American gothic literature was an unusual and specific genre addressing the social dilemmas of the time through poetry, haunting tales and insane stories. It is the strangeness within the familiar and the familiar within the strange. Charlotte Perkins Gilman was an accomplished American author who wrote on the subjects of social reform, feminism and oppression in the late nineteen hundreds, the American gothic era. Gilman’s most debated work is undoubtedly “The Yellow Wallpaper” a short story that was unrecognized in its time and currently is a magnificent work claimed as a pillar for feminism, mental treatment, freedom etc. This complex tale is all that and more, but, “The Yellow Wallpaper” by Charlotte …show more content…
Gilman writes that, “I never thought of it before, but it is lucky that John kept me here after all, I can stand it so much easier than a baby, you see” (6). The narrator initially is willing to please and desires to be ‘well’. This does not apply simply to the woman in “The Yellow Wallpaper” the concepts Charlotte Perkins Gilam wrote can be taken any applied to all individuals in all time periods. Passively allowing ones free-will to be taken is one of the worst things mankind is capable of. American gothic was all about telling the truth but telling it slant in a manner than when the right individual read their work whatever truth the reader was ready to accept would slant into their ears. Gilman, said she only wrote it as an accusation to the treatment of women through a rest cure, while that is true, that is only one angle. The more important truth is that she wrote “The Yellow Wallpaper” as an outcry against self-oppression and intentional delusion. That sort of realization is a personal journey each reader must go on. Only ever accepting one slant of the ‘truth’ is a horrifying reality. Johnson eloquently put is that many “surely would have admired the unnamed heroine of "The Yellow Wallpaper," who will- ingly accepts madness over repression, refusing a life of "unhappy, silent acceptance”. She has come to terms and understood her true potential as a women and individual, and separating herself from the suppressed woman who she grew up with ‘Jane’. she has finally tore down the confines that she had willing aloud to be papered around her and no one, not Jane not John will be able to put her back into the self-confined