Mental Illness In Charlotte Perkins Gilman's The Yellow Wallpaper

Published in 1892, Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper” is a semi-autobiographical story of a woman’s conformity to what is expected of her gender and the damage it causes. In “The Yellow Wallpaper” the narrator is a young woman whose name is questionably Jane in nineteenth century America, who is suffering from a mental illness that is almost certainly postpartum psychosis. Postpartum psychosis involves a series of mental illnesses that follow the birth of the woman’s child and is damaging to a their psyche and is a mental illness that Gilman shares an experience with. Throughout the story Jane is held in isolation in a summer home on a getaway that her husband John recommends. Barbara Welter published a scholarly study in 1966 …show more content…
In the story, John is a physician and the man of authority who has told Jane exactly what she has to do in order to get better. Jane says, “If a physician of high standing, and one’s own husband, assures friends and relatives that there is really nothing the matter with one but temporary nervous depression – a slight hysterical tendency – what is one to do” (Gilman 647)? She admits just afterwards that her brother agrees with John but states that she personally disagrees with their ideas and thinks that excitement and change would be the perfect medicine to assist her in getting better. Although Jane knows what would help her gain her strength back, she complies to her husband’s instructions and holds up in her room as much as possible. In “The Cult of True Womanhood” Welter quotes George Burnap from one of his lectures on The Sphere and Duties of Woman when he says, “She feels herself weak and timid. She needs a protector. She is in a measure dependent. She asks for wisdom, constancy, firmness, perseverance, and she is willing to repay it all by the surrender of the full treasure of her affection” (Welter 51). Burnaps statement relates well to the attitude and state that Jane holds in “The Yellow Wallpaper” when she refrains from fighting her husband and brother’s diagnosis of her. John, more so than her brother, can be seen as Jane’s protector who is looking out for her and only isolating her for her own good and so she can heal and perform the typical wifely duties. Based on the way her husband treats her, it is evident that she cannot be trusted to care for herself or her husband and child; her inability to perform her duties and responsibilities as a wife show that she must depend on those around her to do so. Mary is brought into the house as a caretaker and is also present to see the