Why Charlotte Perkins Gilman Wrote ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’
A physician wrote that “such a story ought not to be written.”
When I was in college, The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman showed me the dark side of psychiatric care in the late 1800s — with the main character of a housewife whose husband is s physician. In the story, the protagonist, the housewife, is prohibited from working, restrained, and ultimately diagnosed with a “temporary nervous depression — a slight hysterical tendency.”
Her psychiatric treatment was known at the time as “rest cure.”
The “nervous depression” comes after the birth of the woman’s baby. The woman and her husband spend their summer in a colonial mansion. In the mansion, she describes the furniture as “inharmonious,” a wallpaper that is “torn off in spots,” and a floor that is “scratched and gouged and splintered.” There is a bed that is “nailed down” and a gate that stops people from coming in and out.
Essentially, the narrator is in prison. And her mental state deteriorates through a symbol of the wallpaper, which gradually comes to have a “sickly sulphur tint.” It also begins to have a very bad, “yellow smell,” and the narrator hallucinates and starts to see the pattern in the paper move. The paper starts to feel like it is strangling her and…
