The Rest Cure: A Thematic Analysis

Historically women have been labeled “the weaker sex” and up until the 20th century had very few rights. A woman 's value was based on her ability to bear sons, cook, clean, and perform other domestic duties. A man virtually owned his wife in the same way he owned his possessions. The myth of the natural inferiority of woman greatly influenced the status of woman. Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper” (1914) was written to increase awareness about the devastating effects oppression had on women and the extreme measures that were required to change popular opinion in regards to women’s rights. Specifically, The Rest Cure, which was prescribed only to women and kept them shut out from the world, was created by Dr. Weir Mitchell. The …show more content…
The narrator says, “You see, he does not believe I am sick! And what is one to do?” (Gilman 473). These two back to back statements made during the same time frame give the reader a glimpse into the narrator’s mind and the conflicting opinion she has within herself. By switching the point of view to third person and back the narrator is exhibiting that she is beginning to dissociate within her mind the conflicting views of how things are and the way she wants them to be. The narrator is oppressed, virtually a prisoner in her own life, she wants freedom. Later in the story, as the narrator describes the 4th of July celebration, she says, “I don’t feel as if it was worthwhile to turn my hand over for anything, and I am getting dreadfully fretful and querulous” (Gilman 474). This sentence is beginning with the past tense and ends in present tense. The narrator is again exhibiting signs of inner conflict over her life and beginning something new, which is her freedom. In an interview, Gilman was quoted as saying that “a physician, in Kansas I think, wrote to say that it was the best description of incipient insanity he had ever seen” (Golden 51). The first person point of view had such great impact because Gilman lived a version of “The Yellow Wallpaper” personally. She could relate and …show more content…
"The Yellow Wallpaper" is so much more than a feminist novella, or work in opposition of patriarchal societies. The message delivered by "The Yellow Wallpaper" was decades ahead of the era in which it was written. Charlotte Perkins Gillman helped to raise awareness for the suffrage of women at the time this was written and it continues to help readers see what it was like to live during the early part of the century. Women have had to earn every inch of freedom that they have now. If it were not for women like Gilman, women would not be where they are today in