Mitchell's Rest Cure In The Yellow Wallpaper By Charlotte Perkins Gilman

Gender, Madness, and Weir Mitchell’s Rest Cure in The Yellow Wallpaper Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s short story The Yellow Wallpaper explores themes of insanity, isolation, and sexism in the late 19th century. Gilman skillfully places the reader inside the head of a deeply unstable narrator, taking the reader along for the ride as she begins a rapid descent into mental illness. However, The Yellow Wallpaper is more than the story of one woman’s mental deterioration; it is a highly personal critique of psychological treatments of the time and of the way that women of the era were systematically repressed and undervalued. In this way, The Yellow Wallpaper skillfully illustrates the narrator’s descent into madness, while also providing the reader

The narrator mentions the wallpaper before she even mentions her infant child, and it becomes increasingly prevalent in the narrative until it completely takes over the narrator’s mind. It traps her, slowly driving her to insanity. The narrator spends a great deal of time describing the wallpaper, and the terms she uses often hold deeply sinistar connotations. Early in the story she writes that the curving patterns within the paper “suddenly commit suicide”; a few lines later she likens the color of the wallpaper to sulphur, which brings to mind the supposedly sulphurous fires of hell

In the essay, she states that The Yellow Wallpaper was largely autobiographical, based off her own experiences with the “rest cure,” a popular treatment for women suffering mental illness at the time (Gilman). The rest cure, created by physician Silas Weir Mitchell, required women undergoing the treatment to remain confined to bed for weeks or months at a time. These women were force fed, and forbidden from reading, writing, or social engagement. Many women felt that the rest cure caused their condition to deteriorate, and in one instance, a woman died from complications relating to the force fed diet (Poirier). Gilman’s essay states that, while undergoing the rest cure, she “...came so near the borderline of utter mental ruin that I could see over” (Gilman). While she never experienced the hallucinations or “objections to my mural decorations” described by the narrator of the piece, she felt that The Yellow Wallpaper was nevertheless representative of her experience