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Rest Cure The Yellow Wallpaper

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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

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