Women In Charlotte Perkins Gilman's The Yellow Wallpaper

Women in the 19th century were subjected to the pressures of societal expectations. In “The Yellow Wallpaper”, the narrator, like many women, struggled with the confines of society. Her husband John was overbearing and able to control every aspect of her life due to him also being her physician. She had a rest cure imposed upon her which isolated her and forced her to suppress her imagination. In Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper”, many factors led to the narrator’s decline to insanity, including her husband John, the treatment that was forced upon her, as well as society.
John, being both her husband and her doctor, has complete control over her wellbeing. He believes he knows what is best for her and treats her like a child.

The narrator’s oppression is symbolized through the nursery as it is a constant reminder of her duty to care for her child. She was forced to stay in the nursery that had bars on the windows, a bed that was nailed to floor, and wallpaper that she hated. The narrator is forced to rest and "absolutely forbidden to ‘work’”(Gilman,1). With the silence and idleness of the "rest cure" imposed upon her, she no longer has a source of mental stimulation other than the wallpaper. She was forbidden from any type of intellectual activity, so her repressed imagination focused on the wallpaper that was a "constant irritant to a normal mind" (Gilman, 6). At first, she was irritated and intrigued by the seemingly random pattern, but soon she became obsessed with figuring it out. Her intrigue to solve it was shown through her determination to follow the pattern to a conclusion: “I lie here on this great immovable bed—it is nailed down, I believe—and follow that pattern about by the hour. It is as good as gymnastics, I assure you. I start, we'll say, at the bottom, down in the corner over there where it has not been touched, and I determine for the thousandth time that I WILL follow that pointless pattern to some sort of a conclusion” (Gilman, 4). The narrator is a creative, imaginative woman who finds her confinement suffocating. The lack of stimulation caused the narrator's mind to fixate on the wallpaper and eventually go insane. Although the rest cure was meant to help her, it only made things worse. The rest cure itself reinforced traditional gender roles placed upon