“The Yellow Wallpaper” written by Charlotte Perkins Gilman in 1892 at the height of the Victorian era is often mistaken as a feminist short story. She tries to tell its readers how women have been confined in this “domestic role” since the beginning of time. The narrator uses the wallpaper to represent the society she lives in. Not only does the wallpaper affect the narrator, but also it influences everyone that meets it. And how these roles ultimately will drive any woman insane. Men dominated the workplace and was head of his household that was just what life was back then. In earlier centuries, it was unusual for a woman to work alongside men. As time went on the nineteenth century, progressed men commuted to their place of work. And as …show more content…
For a person who almost was physically and mentally destroyed by S. Weir Mitchell’s “resting cure” for depression, it is not surprising that Gilman structured her story as an attack on this ineffective and cruel course of treatment. Gilman knew that at some point in the reader’s lives’ they too have experienced the feeling of being over powered something or someone. Gilman was maybe hoping on the fact that the readers would know a little something about claustrophobia or resentment, so that you can sympathize with the narrator of this short story in her slow spiral to insanity. I believe Gilman was not trying to create of form of clinical study of insanity but instead to feel every crawling inch of craziness. “The Yellow Wallpaper” is an illustration of the way a mind that is already infected with anxiety can deteriorate and begin to prey on itself when it is forced into inactivity and kept from healthy work. To his credit, Mitchell, who is mentioned by name in the story, took Gilman’s criticism to heart and abandoned the “resting cure.” Beyond the specific technique described in the story, Gilman means to criticize any form of medical care that ignores the concerns of the patient, considering her only as a passive object of