Peter Weir

The Yellow Wallpaper Mental illnesses in women such as postpartum depression was not considered a real sickness in the1800’s -1900’s. During that time, women were view as delicate, nervous, and weak persons who did not have better things to occupy their minds than creating unreal illness. For most people back then, depression was nothing more than women being bored of their housewife duties having nothing else to do. It was common to treat those women with the famous “rest cure” which, among…

“The Yellow Wallpaper” “The Yellow Wallpaper” was written by Charlotte Perkins Gilman (the story was taken from the book Literature Craft & Voice written by Delbanco and Cheseuse) and is about a woman suffering from postpartum depression. The story main focus is about the popular treatment for this illness in women back in those days called the ‘rest cure’ which almost ruin the authors mental health. She wanted to write this story to help other women prevent going through this situation.…

“The Yellow Wall-paper”, written by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, is written in first person and consist of numerous journal entries. The narrator of the story is a woman who struggles with herself because she suffers from a nervous condition and faces depression. She is confined in an isolated house, on bed rest. She states that the house “is quite alone, standing well back from the road, quite three miles from the village” (844). This house is separated from real life and society and her emotional…

In the late 19th century there was a popularized cure for mentally distressed women known as the ‘rest cure’. The ‘rest cure’ was basically a regime of keeping women forcibly in bed for extended hours, force feeding them large amounts of food, and removing any sort of creative or intellectual outlet. It was basically reducing the woman down to nothing if she was not willing to conform to the societal domestic standards of the time, and this being driven down into nothing is what inspired the…

The “Yellow Wallpaper” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman is a fictional autobiography that illustrates the isolation and oppression women faced during the late nineteenth century. The woman in the story who we later find out is named Jane, is portrayed as somebody who is approaching insanity while searching for some peace in her male dictated world. The author depicts the confinement and oppression of women by explaining the emotional imprisonment of Jane as well as her social and mental state as she…

Feminist struggles One heroine is fighting for her physical independence and another one is fighting for her mental independence. According to critics, women were considered to be “weak bodies and impressible minds” which make them “predisposed to any physical and/ or mental disease that could affect their fragile emotional state” (Treichler, 61). This is the same thing of which Jane became the victim when she tells “if a physician of high standing, and one’s own husband, assures friends and…

In “The Yellow Wallpaper” Charlotte Perkins Gilman utilizes characterization to demonstrate how men abuse their power to ensure women are perceived as incapable beings, and how this abuse becomes internalized within women, resulting in complicity of oppression and deteriorated mental states. John employs his patriarchal and doctoral standings to diagnosis his wife as mentally ill, thus restricting her in misogynistic gender roles. Through John’s actions, his sister Jennie becomes complicit in…

Alix Kates Shulman once said, “Sexism goes so deep that at first it’s hard to see; you think it’s just reality.” Sexism is something that, at one time, was taught, but now is an accepted part of society. The Great Depression brought out the worst aspects of sexism by complicating the roles of women and discrimination and hardships in the workplace and in society. These issues are all depicted through the character of Curley’s wife in the novel, Of Mice and Men, by John Steinbeck. Mother,…

“The Yellow Wallpaper,” written by Charlotte Gilman, is a short story that shocked society when it was first published in 1892. This work was inspired by her own life struggles. Having suffering through postpartum depression, Gilman became an advocate of the pitfalls of rest cure. Yellow, a color commonly associated with the joy eliciting sunshine, is also known as an anxiety inducing color. The color yellow that stains the wallpaper of the room the main character is confined to sets the uneasy…

staying in (Gilman). These strange findings allude the fact that this room is a “rest cure” room of her era and not simply a tattered room because the rest of the house and garden are beautiful. The rest cure method was popularized the physician Silas Weir Mitchell, who primarily used it to treat “nervous women, who as a rule are thin, and lack blood” (9) through “rest, systematic feeding, and passive exercise” (10). This prescription not only makes her stay in this terrifying room but it also…