Neurasthenia In The Yellow Wallpaper

Charlotte Perkin Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper” is a short-story about a woman who has just moved into a rented mansion with her husband, John, for the summer so that she can ameliorate from the sort of postpartum depression she is suffering from. According to her, she’s completely fine but her husband is convinced that she is suffering from “neurasthenia” and prescribes the “rest cure” for her. She is encaged within a room and is prohibited to write and interact with people. The story is believed to be based on a period of Charlotte Perkin Gilman’s own life. In 1887, suffering from depression and fatigue for several years Gilman went to see the renowned physician Silas Wier Mitchell who diagnosed her with “neurasthenia” and prescribed the

It is the ego’s function to create a balance civilized and uncivilized sides of a person. Also there is a danger that if a shadow is suppressed completely it can pounce back upon you in other words the shadow never dies it keeps on living in our unconscious and whenever it finds a weakness in the ego it attacks back and take full control over the psyche of the person. The reason why I have described shadow in such detail is that according to me in The Yellow Wallpaper the narrator at the end of the story is completely under the control of her shadow. There are certain reasons why she is overpowered by her shadow at the end. Throughout the story we can see how her shadow is slowly encaging her and also how her environment is nurturing her rising shadow. From the very introduction of the story we are told that her husband thinks that she is suffering from neurasthenia while she considers herself to be completely fine but because of her husband/physician she has to do whatever he prescribes. She is confined in a room which she doesn’t like but is compelled to live in as she says, “he said he came here solely on my account, that I was to have perfect rest and all the air I