The Yellow Wallpaper

Psychological Thriller: “The Yellow wallpaper”
“The yellow wallpaper” is a short story written by Charlotte Perkins Gilman in 1982. Gilman was a writer and social activist who suffer severe depression during her first marriage. She went through some unusual treatments that later inspired her to write this short story. The yellow wallpaper describes the life of a housewife who is passing througha nervous breakdown due to a post-partum. This story is known as to be her semi-autobiography. Therefore, throughout the story, Gilman projects the unaware situation of the society at that time about mental problems; such as nervous breakdowns and depression, and its treatment under the oppression of man.
From the beginning, the narrator explains how unaware of her situation her husband was,and how she felt trapped under his conviction. She tried to communicate her weird feelings about the new house he rented out for the summer, but instead of listening he insist that it is just a temporary nervous depression she has and that everything is fine. She says: “You see he does not believe I am sick! And what can one do?” (Gilman 415). From this point, the narrator realized that it ispointless to make him understand that her problem needs more attention than what he is giving, and that she would have to resign and deal with this problem on her own. According to the Mayo Clinic, “A nervous breakdown may indicate an underlying mental health problem that needs attention, such as depression or anxiety.” Her uncomfortable feelings towards the house just indicated the first stage of herproblem, if she would have had the attention she needed at the right time, her situation might have been stabilized.
Not only she felt left behind and lonely for her husband’s lack of importance (knowledge) about her problem, but also by the fact that she was put under this “rest cure’ treatment which prohibited her from working and even writing. She was isolated from family and friends, andworst than anything from her newly born baby. The narrator says, “Personally, I disagree with their ideas […] I sometimes fancy that in my condition if I had less opposition and more society and stimulus” (Gilman 416). She understood her condition, and she knew what she needed to get better. However, because of the oppression she was in, she decided to remain silence and do as her husband said. Onedoes not need to be a physician to understand it, one just need to experience it. This shows how inexperienced and uneducated physicians were at that time in this subject. Nowadays one knows that having a person constrain from activities is not a solution for depression. One now understands that a person with depression or anxiety problems needs to have mental and physical activity and avoidfocusing so much on him or herself. On the contrary, in that century, all important people such as educators, reviewers, etc… were men and men could never understand or believe that a woman could get depressed or feel trapped. Men did not respect or understand women the way life understands them now. They would consider these women as ‘lacking control’, and they would define and assign the role of awoman.
Unwilling to communicate with the exterior world, she started getting obsess with the yellow wallpaper inside her room. At first she was horrified by this paper, but soon it became a fascination to her mind. Through the course of the story, the narrator became an avid reader. She tried to read through the wall-paper. “To perceive the narrator as a kind of fiction reader is to see thatGilman’s story projects a brilliant nightmare version of what many nineteenth-century commentators represented as a common reading practice—and a dangerous one” (Hochman 90-91). Critics say that the wall-paper is actually a euphemism speaking the story of the 19th century women who all felt trapped in some way. Women’s life was all about their husbands, and they did not mean much socially. Women were...