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What Is Jane's Treatment In The Yellow Wallpaper

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“The Yellow Wallpaper” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman tells us a story of a woman who at the hands of a patriarchal society went insane. Jane is a woman who is being told by her husband and brother that she needs to have treatment for her health. They want her to do the rest cure where she does nothing but rest. Jane does as they say since they’re physicians and men while she’s just a woman living in a male-dominated society. This type of treatment and her life being controlled by the men in her life eventually would lead to her mental health deteriorating. In the 19th century, the practice of psychology and mental health was barely beginning. The type of medicine and therapy used today was completely different from the types of treatments that were used back then. A popular treatment used especially for women was the rest cure. It was created by Silas Weir Mitchell. The treatment involved the patient to have little to none stimuli. The patient was made to …show more content…

Her obsession with the woman in the wallpaper just becomes bigger and more concerning. Gilman makes the obsession apparent in these lines, “I've seen her! I can see her out of every one of my windows! It is the same woman, I know, for she is always creeping” (10). She doesn’t sleep and watches the woman crawl all night. She begins seeing the woman outside, running and hiding whenever she might be spotted by someone. She even starts acting like the woman when she’s in the wallpaper. Golden says “As the muted pattern becomes dominant to the narrator, her delusions translate into actions of madness… She sees the woman behind the wallpaper creeping and begins to creep herself” (31). This shows her progression further into insanity. The rest cure is giving her so little stimuli that she invented a woman in the wall and became obsessed over yellow wallpaper as to have some form of

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588 Words | 3 Pages

She proceeds to explain the contributing factors of the narrator succumbing to her “disease” of hysteria which was isolation from social interaction and the restriction of her own thoughts. She points out that the narrator is confined to a simple square room with nothing to offer in terms of mental health therapy. The narrator’s lack of the ability to interact with anything or anyone leads to infatuation with the wallpaper, which turns out to be “the

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1007 Words | 5 Pages

Since her husband, a physician of high standard, has prescribed a "rest cure" for her nervous condition, the protagonist is forced to suppress her creative urges and conform to societal expectations of a submissive and passive wife who is to remain still in a room with “the yellow wallpaper.” This suppression ultimately leads to her descent into madness as she struggles to reconcile her own desires with the expectations placed upon her. While the lady narrates the entire story, it is interesting to note that she is not in control of her own life and decisions. Rather, she is a victim of societal norms and gender roles that restrict her agency and

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226 Words | 1 Pages

As the story progresses the tone begins to become paranoid and disturbed. This is shown when the protagonist repeatedly sees a women in the wallpaper and believes her to want to escape (Gilman, 430). This is not the first time we think the women to be insane; it is also mentioned at the beginning as stated, “ If

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717 Words | 3 Pages

She slowly starts to fear her Husband, she notes how there is an odd smell that accumulates in her room, and she always references the yellow wallpaper, in that it changes in certain ways. She began to comment on how some parts of the wallpaper was torn, then she progressed to how there were bouts of fungus growing on the walls until she begins to speak of how the pattern on the wallpaper shakes because of the “woman behind it.” “Sometimes I think there are a great many women behind, and sometimes only one, and she crawls around fast, and her crawling shakes it all over,” this is when her sanity is clearly broken. She moves on from talking about her husband, the daylight, and the room itself to only speaking of the women and how she moves around. This clear descent into madness is a byproduct of how she is often dismissed by her husband and brother concerning her

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483 Words | 2 Pages

At first glance, she seems like an ordinary woman going through something heartbreaking, but she slowly loses more and more of her senses throughout the story, mainly because of the prison-like room she's trapped in. She's being kept captive against her will in a dimly lit room with iron bars on the window frames and most notably, with musky yellow wallpapers on every wall. The wallpaper's seemingly never-ending patterns seem to take the greatest toll on her psyche and as a result, her condition gradually worsens. However, the setting of The Yellow Wallpaper isn't the only variable that affects the narrator's mental

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2004 Words | 9 Pages

The wallpaper in her room leads to her madness throughout the story and instead of curing her, this makes her symptom of nervous depression even worse than it already is. The story portrays that the female character has very unstable mental health, implying that females are weaker than men emotionally.

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1024 Words | 5 Pages

Women were seen as mentally fragile and hysterical, with treatments such as “rest-cures” existing as a means of not “upsetting” the female patient. This sentiment can be seen throughout the story, from the narrator’s diagnosis to the treatment she receives as a result. For instance, the narrator was not properly diagnosed with postpartum depression, but rather what her brother and husband describe as “ temporary nervous depression—a slight hysterical tendency"(The Project Gutenberg eBook of the Yellow Wallpaper, by Charlotte Perkins Gilman). Despite saying that she is sick, her brother and husband quickly dismiss her concerns and tell her friends and family she is healthy.

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227 Words | 1 Pages

During the day, the wallpaper makes very little “movement”; it is almost as if the shadowy figure is being still and silent. The figures movements represent the protagonists movements, during the day she is prim and proper, trying to make her husband believe she is doing exactly what he wants by “sleeping”; at night the woman is alive, trying to discover herself and the things that she likes, realizing how trapped she is against her husband’s wishes, trying to break free from the bars that are holding her back. One can see the negative effects of John’s (and society’s) treatment of the narrator in her response to the rest cure. At first, she tries to fight against the growing lethargy that controls her. She even challenges John’s treatment

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797 Words | 4 Pages

She becomes obsessed with the patterns of the wallpaper, but she mainly notices a woman that she thinks is trying to free herself from the confines of the wall. During the day this woman is still, but when night time comes around, it seems as though the woman creeps around. Towards the end of the story, the narrator has a breakdown and thinks that she is this woman inside of the wallpaper, and begins to perform similar actions like creeping around. This meaning of this scene is simple cause and effect. Not only did she already have postpartum depression, but she is basically trapped in this house for a whole summer with nothing to do so she can heal.

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675 Words | 3 Pages

When she thinks John and Jennie is aware of her obsession she goes into a frenzy and starts to bite and rip at the wallpaper. At this point the narrator thinks she herself came out of the wallpaper and when John sees his wife in her state of insanity he faint in the

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1008 Words | 5 Pages

However, we later see a shift in her feelings towards the wallpaper as she states that she is growing “really fond of the room in spite of the wallpaper” and comes to a realization that it may be “because of the wallpaper” (Par 94) As her opinions on the wallpaper begin to change, the progression of her mental instability becomes increasing visible. She begins to build a relationship with the wallpaper and claims that “There are things in that paper that nobody knows about” (Par 22) her. As this relationship with the wallpaper builds, her sanity begins to slip, and the hallucinations begin in a somewhat minor manor. In her first mention of “the woman” she says that the pattern on the

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814 Words | 4 Pages

However as time moves on, and the woman in the wallpaper becomes more and more real to her, it’s clear that her mental state is rapidly depleting. Her first description of a figure in the wallpaper came when she stated that the wallpaper had a “recurrent spot where the pattern lolls like a broken neck and two bulbous eyes stare at you upside down” (219). By the time the story ends, the narrator had turned into the

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1155 Words | 5 Pages

Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper” is a first-person written feminist short story that critiques and condemns the nineteenth-century American male attitude towards women and their physical as well as mental health issues. In the short story, Perkins Gilman juxtaposes universal gender perspectives of women with hysterical tendencies using the effects of gradually accumulating levels of solitary confinement; a haunted house, nursery, and the yellow wallpaper to highlight the American culture of inherited oblivious misogyny and promote the equality of sexes. The narrator and her husband, John, embody the general man and woman of the nineteenth century. John, like the narrator’s brother and most men, is “a physician of high

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1106 Words | 5 Pages

Depression and isolation caused by the misdiagnosis caused Jane to go insane. The rest treatment was a common form of cure for people with depression. It worked for some people while it did not work for some. Instead of curing the depression, it only sends the patients into further depression and isolation.

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484 Words | 2 Pages

(99). The woman on the floor trying to take the wallpaper down would not let her husband in as he tried to knock the door down, but she does not realize she is doing it to herself. For example, Catherine Golden states in her article that, “The narrator seems detached from the bits of wallpaper on the floor next to her and John wallpaper fragments that could be read as a literal representation of the source of her insanity. The narrator’s hallucinations and action of tearing down the wallpaper to free the woman trapped behind the wallpaper pattern condemn her to madness” (60).

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