I was fond of the short story The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman. It was published in 1892 and is important in early feminist literature as it deals with the issues of women and madness. On my first reading of the story I was confused with the obsession of the wallpaper and repetition of the woman. But after further reading I understood the message of the story. It is about a woman who is diagnosed by her husband as suffering from nervousness. The woman’s husband feels he knows what is best for her, because he is a doctor and because he is her husband he controls the woman who is suffering from post-natal depression. At the time post-natal depression would not have been understood and it would have been seen as highly unnatural …show more content…
In the story the woman has to write in secret. Her husband completely controls her life. When she asks him if she may visit her cousins he refuses saying that she would not be able to because of her health. The woman describes her husband as caring but towards the end of the story it is his method of caring for his wife that lead to her increasingly unhappy state. She suffers from complete boredom. The room she is staying in with the yellow wallpaper becomes a symbol of the woman’s entrapment by her marriage. Early in the story the woman when talking of her husband says, “John laughs at me, of course, but one expects that”, the woman is so oppressed by her husband that she is not at all surprised when he does not take her seriously. The husband who is a Physician is described as a man of science, he disregards his wife’s illness as a nervous depression which can be cured by rest. Gilman was critical of the “so-called rest cure” which was used frequently by doctors at the time. Having suffered due to the treatment she is against it, and the woman in the story says that she feels it is the opposite of what she needs. The boredom leads to the woman’s obsession with the yellow wallpaper in her room, she has nothing else to stimulate her mind and stares at the wallpaper for long periods ultimately