Yellow Wallpaper Depression

In The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman is a cautionary tale about fighting depression with depression. Depression is defined as, feeling of sadness or gloom or, “a psychoneurotic or psychotic disorder marked especially by sadness, inactivity, difficulty in thinking and concentration, a significant increase or decrease in appetite and time spent sleeping, feelings of dejection and hopelessness, and sometimes suicidal tendencies.” ("Depression." Merriam-Webster.com. Merriam-Webster, n.d. Web. 8 Dec. 2016.) John; the narrator’s husband gave had put her on rest care. Rest care is a time when a patient is placed under watch and is unable to care for oneself. These are all medical diseases the narrator experiences driving her to her

She includes how she sheltered her husband from her problems and acted sane for his sake. “John does not know how much I really suffer. He knows there is no reason to suffer, and that satisfies him…” (Perkins Gilman). Gilman speaks of how the husband misdiagnosed his wife with hysteria and ignored her problems; as if they were a nuisance on him. He didn’t believe she had a reason to be depressed and was simply stressed. The narrator speaks of her husband’s disbeliefs in the opening paragraphs. “You see he does not believe I am sick… assures friends and relatives there is really nothing the matter with one…” The narrator knows she is sick, but, her husband does not believe in her sickness because she has no signs. Postpartum wasn’t known of until the 19th century when women actually spoke of their symptoms. She

“the author's unnamed character, a new mother struggling for selfhood, passes through a hedge, locked gates, and an entranceway before languishing in total seclusion, like a scolded child returned to a suffocating womb.” Gilman uses the room to show the author’s oppressed opinion of her own medical care. The narrator’s husband believes he knows what’s best for her as he is a doctor. He takes the liberty himself of placing his wife in the small room. She knows work will help but, he won’t hear it. The narrator starts to believe the lady trapped behind the wallpaper is trying to escape. “the shape of an incarcerated woman in the decor, a doppelgänger image of herself as a powerless, suppressed victim of patriarchy reduced to two dimensions and pasted to the wall. Gradually, horrific outlines appear in the design as the patient hallucinates and regresses to total collapse.” The narrator starts to tear the wallpaper off and finishes by the time her husband comes back. She speaks of herself in what seems to be a third person; almost as if she is and became the woman in the