ipl-logo

Rest Cure The Yellow Wallpaper

1129 Words5 Pages

Rest Cure: The Yellow Wall-Paper Rest Cure is a period spent in inactivity or leisure with the intention of improving one's physical or mental health. It was once a popular treatment for nervous disorders and many of us learned of the treatment through Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s short story The Yellow Wall-Paper. Without the haunting tale described by the narrator in the story, we may never have come to understand why the rest cure treatment could not save everyone from their own mental anguish and rest cure can prove to sometimes do more harm than good. Silas Weir Mitchell developed the rest cure in the late 1800s for the treatment of hysteria, neurasthenia and other nervous illnesses (Rest Cure). Dr. Silas Mitchell was a well-known physician …show more content…

Her husband who is her physician during the time of her rest cure may possibly be treating her for post-partum depression. The narrator is secluded to an upstairs room of a rented house that used to be a nursery and playroom. It seems to be a fairly large room with lots of windows so that she can see outside. However, even with the large spacious room, the narrator is displeased with one thing in the room…the yellow wallpaper. She humors herself and her husband, in the beginning, trying to conform to the orders of her husband/doctor. One thing the narrator wanted to avoid was her husband sending her to Weir Mitchell in the fall. (Gilman 213). To evade being sent to Weir Mitchell she tries to hide her thoughts and pretend her treatment is working. In time her mind becomes more altered the longer she stays in the room with the yellow wallpaper bringing the narrator to a madness she cannot control. She starts to see hallucinations as movement and the form of a woman appears in the wallpaper. “I can see a strange, provoking, formless sort of figure, that seems to skulk about behind that silly and conspicuous front design” (Gilman 212). The narrator believes she sees a woman trapped behind all the designs in the wallpaper and she wants nothing more than to get her

Show More
Related
935 Words | 4 Pages

Together the themes of manipulation and mental illness will trigger a series of events that change their lives. In “The Yellow Wallpaper” the protagonist becomes increasingly obsessed with the yellow wallpaper in her bedroom and seclusion from human contact. This was a cure that her husband John prescribed that proved detrimental to her mental health. As she spends more time alone in the room, she becomes fixated on the patterns and images, slowly becoming convinced there is a woman behind the wall that is trapped and that she must free, "The front pattern does move—and no wonder!

Read More
982 Words | 4 Pages

Since she has stayed in the room for such a long time, the yellow wallpaper soon become too much for her to handle which leads to her mental health slowly

Read More
717 Words | 3 Pages

She slowly starts to fear her Husband, she notes how there is an odd smell that accumulates in her room, and she always references the yellow wallpaper, in that it changes in certain ways. She began to comment on how some parts of the wallpaper was torn, then she progressed to how there were bouts of fungus growing on the walls until she begins to speak of how the pattern on the wallpaper shakes because of the “woman behind it.” “Sometimes I think there are a great many women behind, and sometimes only one, and she crawls around fast, and her crawling shakes it all over,” this is when her sanity is clearly broken. She moves on from talking about her husband, the daylight, and the room itself to only speaking of the women and how she moves around. This clear descent into madness is a byproduct of how she is often dismissed by her husband and brother concerning her

Read More
912 Words | 4 Pages

With all the effort needed to write and make her logs she eventually becomes exhausted and slows down making logs, not only that her logs become shorter her vocabulary less formal and fluent. She turns to the wallpaper as the intellectual stimulus she needs and uses it to keep her mind intact but slowly losing it as a result of this, beginning with her hatred for the wallpaper following with her curiosity of the patterns and her determination to find some kind of conclusion to the wallpaper and then finally describing the wallpaper to have a woman trapped inside of itself. As we see her descent into insanity it shows her true feelings of imprisonment and finds herself being the woman in the wallpaper until eventually breaking free from her confinement like the woman in the wallpaper had done before, although it was already far too late for our

Read More
870 Words | 4 Pages

The rest cure is giving her so little stimuli that she invented a woman in the wall and became obsessed over yellow wallpaper as to have some form of

Read More
1248 Words | 5 Pages

In Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s short story, “The Yellow Wallpaper”, the narrator is suffering from postpartum depression. The narrator 's husband John, who also happens to be her physician, prescribes the rest cure to help lift his wife of her depressive state and ultimately heal her depression. However, the rest cure does not allow the narrator to experience any mental stimulation. Therefore, to manage her boredom the narrator begins obsessing over the pattern of the yellow wallpaper. After analyzing the pattern for awhile, the narrator witnesses a woman trapped behind bars.

Read More
165 Words | 1 Pages

In “The Yellow Wallpaper” Dr. Weir Mitchell has had completed the bed rest prescribed to the narrator after giving birth. She has to follow the resting cure, so is not able to write in her journal, have a conversation with someone nor walk in the garden. The narrator feels as though the cure is painful for her to do. Longing to walking in the garden, she is stuck there having to look at the furniture. What disturbs her the most is the yellow wallpaper she finds.

Read More
1113 Words | 5 Pages

Secondly, throughout the story, the narrator describes seeing an evolving woman trapped inside of the wall. Although readers can assume that this woman is merely a product of the narrator’s mind, the woman can also be seen as a symbol of the narrator and her feelings of being trapped. Eventually, the woman in the wall aids the narrator in her escape. In conclusion, many elements of the narrator’s increasing madness throughout The Yellow Wallpaper contributed to her freedom from the confines of the room, the confines of society, and the confines of her

Read More
1232 Words | 5 Pages

As this progresses, the woman starts to go mad from ignorance and starts to believe there is someone behind the Wallpaper. In her room, the narrator starts to obsess over the Wallpaper. The Wallpaper symbolizes women starting to realize how unfair they were treated and how responded to this. As the women’s illness keeps getting subdued by her husband, she starts to go mad and the wallpaper demonstrates this. In the third entry of her diary she says, “Of

Read More
797 Words | 4 Pages

The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman is a short story set in the 1890s about a female narrator who struggles with postpartum depression. She moves into a home for the summer with her husband, John. Since she has this sickness, John forbids her from doing any sort of activities other than some houes work. If she was doing anything, her husband would want her to rest to help with her illness. This was a common "cure" known at the rest cure back then.

Read More
1155 Words | 5 Pages

Her husband had brought her to this house so that her mental health would improve. However, the house that was supposed to help the narrator, caused her symptoms to eventually become worse. The room that the narrator’s husband chose for them to stay in had an atrocious yellow wallpaper that covered each and every wall. The pattern on the wallpaper described the connection between domestic life and the life that [the narrator] lives (Thrailkill 542). Along with the horrid wallpaper, the room had floors with gouges and splinters, and the plaster on the walls was dug out in some places.

Read More
814 Words | 4 Pages

However as time moves on, and the woman in the wallpaper becomes more and more real to her, it’s clear that her mental state is rapidly depleting. Her first description of a figure in the wallpaper came when she stated that the wallpaper had a “recurrent spot where the pattern lolls like a broken neck and two bulbous eyes stare at you upside down” (219). By the time the story ends, the narrator had turned into the

Read More
648 Words | 3 Pages

She begins to slip away from reality and into her dreamlike world. The woman seen in the wallpaper mirrors the narrator 's plight for freedom. While she is free from the restraints of marriage and motherhood, she has been consumed by madness. John dominates the relationship, both as doctor and husband.

Read More
1155 Words | 5 Pages

Nonetheless, the narrator continues to pen her ideas about the wallpaper as it transpired from being perplexing to gaining clarity each day. Amidst arriving at a full conclusion of what the wallpaper depicts, the narrator says she sees “a woman stooping down and creeping about behind the pattern” (Perkins Gilman, 50). As the days passed,

Read More
989 Words | 4 Pages

She states, “But I am here, and no person touches this paper but me, not alive(Gilman 655).” In this statement, she is saying that only dead people can truly understand the wallpaper and all its beauty. By saying this, she is telling us that she has died and become the woman in the wallpaper. Once she tells herself that she has come out of the wallpaper, she starts to see that other women have come out of

Read More

More about Rest Cure The Yellow Wallpaper

Open Document