The Yellow Wallpaper Mental Illness Essay

Woman and Illness in Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wall-Paper”
The appearance of madness, even when it is unthreatening and does no harm to others, can be terribly frightening. Writers like Edgar Allan Poe and Stephen King have built entire artistic careers out of the terrifying nature of insanity. What makes mental illness fascinating is how difficult it is to tell the difference between actual insanity and external terrors. For example, if a person in a story sees ghosts, it can be impossible to know if the ghosts actually exist or if the person is out of her mind. Charlotte Perkins Gilman, in her short story
“The Yellow Wall-Paper,” plays with the boundary between sanity and insanity to create a woman who is either imprisoned by

She is clearly insane, but the source of her madness is not supernatural. She is losing her mind because of her overly controlling husband.
Because the narrator’s husband is a “physician of high standing” and a man with a scientific mind, he discredits his wife’s feelings about her own health. One of the first things the narrator reveals is his skepticism about her illness: “You see he does not believe I am sick!”(647). Even stranger, perhaps, is that at the same time he discredits her feelings and denies her illness, he diagnoses her with what sounds a lot like a health condition: he
“assures friends and relatives that there is nothing the matter . . . but temporary nervous depression—a slight hysterical tendency. . . .” (648). This belief is strange for two reasons: first of all, especially since he is supposedly her “careful and loving” (648) husband, it seems cold and uncaring; and second, illness is often something sensible only to the patient and cannot be felt by anyone else. Maybe he feels that she is not an expert in medical matters and cannot understand her own mind and body, while he is a highly respected physician. It is even possible that he thinks a man always knows more than a woman about everything,

He loves me very dearly and hates to have me sick” (651). Her illness, however, is not a virus that has entered her body. Her illness is her desire to be free in a family which resists her freedom. Therefore, her doctor husband, John, does not hate to have her sick; he hates who she is. What makes this story terrifying is that her husband is not a monster. He is an ordinary man who wants his wife to stay in the house doing the things a wealthy wife does—which is not much, including taking care of her own baby.
It is not surprising, then, that she begins to tear the house down around her, shredding the wall-paper, even gnawing on the furniture to escape her husband’s control. She sees “a great many women behind” (654) the wall-paper, and the only thing they have that resembles freedom is to be “always creeping” (654) around, hiding from people like her own husband. At last, she decides to capture one of these women, so she can “astonish” (655) her husband and prove to him that they exist. She even finds rope to tie one up, but it is not until the very end that it becomes clear that the woman she has been seeking is