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The Yellow Wallpaper Biography & Facts

"The Yellow Wallpaper" (original title: "The Yellow Wall-paper. A Story") is a short story by American writer Charlotte Perkins Gilman, first published in January 1892 in The New England Magazine. It is regarded as an important early work of American feminist literature for its illustration of the attitudes towards mental and physical health of women in the 19th century. It is also lauded as an excellent work of horror fiction. The story is written as a collection of journal entries narrated in the first person. The journal was written by a woman whose physician husband has rented an old mansion for the summer. Forgoing other rooms in the house, the husband confines the woman to an upstairs nursery. As a form of treatment, the husband forbids the journal writer from working or writing, and encourages her to eat well and get plenty of air so that she can recuperate from what he calls a "temporary nervous depression – a slight hysterical tendency", a common diagnosis in women at the time. As the reader continues through the journal entries, they experience the writer's gradual descent into madness with nothing better to do than observe the peeling yellow wallpaper in her room. Plot summary The story describes a young woman and her husband. He imposes a rest cure on her when she suffers "temporary nervous depression" after the birth of their baby. They spend the summer at a colonial mansion, where the narrator is largely confined to an upstairs nursery. The story makes striking use of an unreliable narrator in order to gradually reveal the degree to which her husband has "imprisoned" her due to her physical and mental condition. She describes torn wallpaper, barred windows, metal rings in the walls, a floor "scratched and gouged and splintered," a bed bolted to the floor, and a gate at the top of the stairs, but blames all these on children who must have resided there. The narrator devotes many journal entries to describing the wallpaper in the room – its "sickly" color, its "yellow" smell, its bizarre and disturbing pattern like "an interminable string of toadstools, budding and sprouting in endless convolutions," its missing patches, and the way it leaves yellow smears on the skin and clothing of anyone who touches it. She describes how the longer one stays in the bedroom, the more the wallpaper appears to mutate, especially in the moonlight. With no stimulus other than the wallpaper, the pattern and designs become increasingly intriguing to the narrator. She soon begins to see a figure in the design. Eventually, she comes to believe that a woman is creeping on all fours behind the pattern. Believing she must free the woman in the wallpaper, she begins to strip the remaining paper off the wall. When her husband arrives home, the narrator refuses to unlock her door. When he returns with the key, he finds her creeping around the room, rubbing against the wallpaper, and exclaiming, "I've got out at last... in spite of you." He faints, but she continues to circle the room, creeping over his inert body each time she passes it, believing herself to have become the woman trapped behind the yellow wallpaper. Interpretations Gilman Gilman used her writing to explore the role of women in America around 1900. She expanded upon many issues, such as the lack of a life outside the home and the oppressive forces of a patriarchal society. Through her work, Gilman paved the way for writers such as Alice Walker and Sylvia Plath. In "The Yellow Wallpaper," she portrays the narrator's insanity as a way to protest the professional and societal oppression against women. While under the impression that husbands and male doctors were acting with their best interests in mind, women were depicted as mentally fragile. Women’s rights advocates of the era believed that the "outbreak" of this mental instability was the manifestation of their setbacks regarding the roles they were allowed to play in a male-dominated society. Women were even discouraged from writing because it would ultimately create an identity and become a form of defiance. Gilman realized that writing became one of the only forms of existence for women at a time when they had very few rights. After the birth of her first daughter, Gilman suffered postnatal depression and was treated by Dr. Silas Weir Mitchell, the leading expert on women's mental health at the time. He suggested a strict 'rest cure' regimen involving much of bed rest and a blanket ban on working, including reading, writing, and painting. After three months and almost desperate, Gilman decided to contravene her diagnosis, along with the treatment methods, and started to work again. Aware of how close she had come to a complete mental breakdown, the author wrote ”The Yellow Wallpaper” with additions and exaggerations to illustrate her criticism of the medical field. Gilman sent a copy to Mitchell but never received a response. (Gilman was ultimately proven right in her disdain for the "rest cure" when she sought a second opinion from Mary Putnam Jacobi, one of the first female doctors and a strong opponent of this theory, who prescribed a regimen of physical and mental activity that proved a much more successful treatment.) She added that "The Yellow Wallpaper" was "not intended to drive people crazy, but to save people from being driven crazy, and it worked". Gilman claimed that many years later, she learned that Mitchell had changed his treatment methods. However, literary historian Julie Bates Dock has discredited this. Mitchell continued his methods, and as late as 1908 – 16 years after "The Yellow Wallpaper" was published – was interested in creating entire hospitals devoted to the "rest cure" so that his treatments would be more widely accessible. Feminist Interpretations This story has been interpreted by feminist critics as a condemnation of the male control of the 19th-century medical profession. Throughout the short story, the narrator offers many suggestions to help her get better, such as exercising, working, or socializing with the outside world. Her ideas are dismissed immediately while using language that stereotypes her as irrational and, therefore, unqualified to offer ideas about her condition. This interpretation draws on the concept of the "domestic sphere" that women were held in during this period. Many feminist critics focus on the degree of triumph at the end of the story. Although some claim the narrator slipped into insanity, others see the ending as a woman's assertion of agency in a marriage in which she felt trapped. The emphasis on reading and writing as gendered practices also illustrated the importance of the wallpaper. If the narrator were allowed neither to write in her journal nor to read, she would begin to "read" the wallpaper until she found the escape she was looking for. Through seeing the women in the wallpaper, the narrator realizes that she could not live her life locked up behind bars. At the end of the story.... Discover the The Yellow Wallpaper popular books. Find the top 100 most popular The Yellow Wallpaper books.