The Yellow Wallpaper Mental Illness

Gilman, the author, represents her own life in the story “The Yellow Wallpaper”. This story illustrates the situation that a married woman with depression goes through. The story is allegedly placed in a rental house the husband acquired but the plot is on the narrator´s room. Within the story the narrator gives importance to a yellow wallpaper placed insider her room. She spends hours describing it in many and different ways, she also imagines things and shapes on the wallpaper. Throughout the story the reader faces doubts on whether the protagonist has, in some way, any mental issue aside from depression. The narrator explains many events of what she lives, sees, and thinks, that gives the reader a sense that she is probably imaging it all …show more content…
However, the symptoms and situations Gilman describes in the story relate more to dementia and schizophrenia. That yellow wallpaper, where most of the descriptions or hallucinations, I would say, is a big evidence that she is mentally sick. As she mentions, “I didn’t realize what the thing was that showed behind, that dim sub-pattern, but now I’m quite sure it is a woman” (138). Not only she states the presence of a person´s shape on the wallpaper but she later says that the same person that was on the wallpaper was walking on the street while she was looking through the window. She event mentions that she is the only person who can notice all those shapes and figures. She fears that someone else could notice it too. The only explanation is that thanks to her dementia or schizophrenia she associates the outsider things to the shapes she finds or creates on the wallpaper. She needs that to not be anxious and …show more content…
The hourly medication and the lack of sleep that she has could probably lead to make up a whole new life in her head. It is hard to believe but it is a realistic theory since the readers are limited to only read narrator’s part of the story. The way she expresses about John and how sure she is that John is doing everything because he loves her, also make the story somehow suspicious. However, it is also difficult to see a relation between John and the narrator. There is no solid evidence that John expresses affection to the narrator. John’s acts open many questions about if he really cares about her apparent wife’s health. Little details show that it could exist something between the doctor and her as John states, “Your exercise depends on your strength, my dear” (130). It does not represent a strong fact proving that they were married. Doctor could say it due to her mental health and good, a bad comment could lead to make his patient feel