The Yellow Wallpaper Postpartum Psychosis

During times of post-pregnancy, there are various apparent changes the mother experiences; the most evident would be the physical and social changes. What people may not realize is that there are psychological changes as well that can result in postpartum depression, postpartum anxiety, or even postpartum psychosis. In the short story "The Yellow Wallpaper" by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, the unnamed narrator suffers from neurasthenia. Postpartum psychosis was not yet classified as a mental condition in the midst of the nineteenth century when this story came about. In “The Yellow Wallpaper”, the narrator was prescribed the “rest cure” (Gilman) where she is restricted from any physical, mental, or emotional activity. The reality of the situation

As both her doctor and her husband, John holds dominance over the narrator than she has the ability to withstand. Therefore, elucidating the impression that this control “wears her [the narrator] down to the point that she ultimately does, as he fears she will, lose her grasp on reality” (Suess). According to Lacan psychology, “the psychotic individual…is unable to obtain either a sense of communality or self-identity because he or she, [is] barred from entering the Symbolic Order” (Suess). In “The Yellow Wallpaper”, Jane believes she is the woman in the wallpaper and Symbolic Order represents the oppressive bars of the paper that she cannot escape. Unable to free herself from the wallpaper, the narrator explicitly contemplates suicide when she states she is “getting angry enough to do something desperate. To jump out the window would be an admirable exercise” (Gilman). In spite of the fact that she later claims she would not do it, the narrator is experiencing rapid mood swings, another symptom of postpartum depression, that may conflict with her thoughts. In addition to this, the narrator reveals she has “got a rope up here that even Jennie did not find” (Gilman) that could be used as her murder weapon. With a fragmented state of mind, the narrator deliberately thinks about taking her own life for the sake of escaping

Like the narrator, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, the story’s author, had suffered from post-partum depression and was prescribed the rest cure. The rest cure’s impact on Gilman was similar to the impact the treatment had on the narrator in which Gilman “came so near the borderline of utter mental ruin” (Gilman). However, unlike the narrator, Gilman was helped by a wise friend and went back to work “ultimately recovering some measure of power” (Gilman). With proper treatment and support, Gilman was able to pick herself back up from mental ruin and write “The Yellow Wallpaper” to share the adverse effects the rest cure had on women. Gilman states, the story “was not intended to drive people crazy, but to save people from being driven crazy, and it worked.” She was later informed that the story led a specialist to alter his treatment of neurasthenia that probably saved many