The Yellow Wallpaper Mental Illness Analysis

Signs of a Mental Illness in “The Yellow Wallpaper” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman Charlotte Gilman had a rollercoaster of a life. She suffered through mental illnesses such as depression and anxiety. Also, she was one of the victims of S. Weir Mitchell’s Mitchell treatment to cure her anxiety. Throughout the piece, Gilman shows evidence of anxiety with the use of imagery and symbolism. One example of Gilman’s anxiety, “There is a recurrent spot where the pattern lolls like a broken neck and two bulbous eyes stare at you upside down” displays how her anxiety has reached a level and she is imagining a person staring back at her (Gilman 475). The broken neck and the bulging eyes she sees could represent how she feels inside being held prisoner in the nursery. Symbols portray a big part in this sentence also. A broken neck could symbolize all the pressure the Gilman received from being locked away in a psychiatric hospital. The vast eyes could symbolize how wide her eyes were to come to realize the mental disorder she had, opened her mind to something pessimistic. …show more content…
Also, she was kept from writing or doing anything artistic just as the main character was and was kept secluded by Weir Mitchel, “…locking Gilman away in his Philadelphia sanitarium for a month, enforcing strict isolation… and forbidding her to touch pen, pencil, or paintbrush ever again” she wasn’t allowed to express herself in her writing because his theory was that literature was at fault for her mental illness (Bak 1). Charlotte wrote “The Yellow Wallpaper” and sent it to Weir Mitchell. My guess was to display the damage he was doing instead of the good, which worked since he altered his treatment after reading the short story. Although Gilman committed suicide, the impact she left on Mitchel prevented others from going through the torture she went