Postpartum Depression In The Yellow Wallpaper By Charlotte Perkins Gilman

The short story “The Yellow Wallpaper” explores a woman’s journey as she attempts to escape the male-dominated society’s restrictions. Taking place in the 1890s, the central character, Jane, and her physician husband, John, move to a new summer house, and under his influence, she’s confined to the nursery room to help treat her postpartum depression. Over time, with the strict isolation and terrible yellow wallpaper, Jane’s mental health further deteriorates, ultimately leading to her madness. In “The Yellow Wallpaper,” Gilman examines the traditional gender roles of women and stigmas surrounding mental health in the late 1800s through the narrator’s struggle with postpartum depression as she is stifled and controlled by her husband and the

Although she suffers from post-partum depression, her physician husband doesn’t recognize her mental illness. As a result, he puts her under the “rest-cure treatment,” a popular mental health remedy of that time where mental stimulation was highly discouraged by leading “as domestic a life.as possible” (Sahoo 8). However, through the narrator’s diary entries, it’s evident that the treatment only worsens her condition. She starts getting distressed over this “yellow smell” and how it “creeps all over the house.lying in wait” which even pushes her to consider burning the whole house down (Gilman 8). Through the eerie personification of smell and the first-person point of view, the reader is given insight into the state of madness Jane is driven to and the all-encompassing paranoia she deals with. She would much rather destroy the house, endangering herself and everyone else in it, just to have some sense of control over the situation and her life. Furthermore, the direct and indirect characterization of John reveals the cultural structure and hierarchy of the late Victorian Era as it relates to science and mental

This was the case because society understood then that the “physician is the quintessential man” whose words “[represent] institutional authority” and must “reflect reality” (Ford 2). As such, when the doctors enforced ideas like women’s hysterical nature and attributed their mental illnesses to these biases, many women like Jane went undiagnosed and were put under treatments that only intensified their illnesses. In terms of mental health, reality and forms of treatment were determined by the men who continued to play into the oppression of women. In all, with the emotional first-person point of view and characterization of dominant figures, Gilman illustrates how women’s mental disorders were overlooked and the overall structure of how mental health was influenced by those with power. In conclusion, Charlotte Perkins Gilman has put on display both the complex gender discrimination and the unique struggles women faced with mental health stigmas throughout the end of the 1800s and early