Yellow Wallpaper Thesis

Charlotte Perkins Gilman was born in 1860 and was one of a lineage of feminists and woman suffragist. She suffered postpartum depression after her first child was born and was instructed by Dr. Silas Weir Mitchell to undergo “rest care,” a treatment in which she would “live a domestic a life as possible,” keep her children with her always, and have only “two hours of intellectual life a day. Gilman wrote “The Yellow Wallpaper”, published in 1892, as an indictment of the rest cure. In the story, “The Yellow Wallpaper”, by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, the plot is written in first person. The unnamed narrator, through her depression and illness feels trapped in her life being locked in a room with yellow wallpaper. The story gets very strange when the narrator talks about how her and the lady in the wallpaper creep around the room and the narrator lays wide awaken in bed with her husband as she stares at the wallpaper. In “The Yellow Wallpaper”, the unnamed narrator suffers from depression following the birth of her baby. Her husband misdiagnoses her with hysteria and prescribes “the rest cure”. She’s isolated from everyone but her husband and nurse, and she’s not allowed to write, though this makes her …show more content…
The next day she manages to be alone and goes into something of a frenzy, biting and tearing at the paper in order to free the trapped woman, who she sees struggling from inside the pattern. By the end, the narrator is hopelessly insane, she has convinced herself that there are many creeping women around and that she herself has come out of the wallpaper, that she herself is the trapped woman. She creeps endlessly around the room, smudging the wallpaper as she goes. When John breaks into the locked room and sees the full situation, he faints in the doorway, so that the narrator has “to creep over him every