“The Yellow Wallpaper” written by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, is a short story about a woman who is forced to stay at home in a room, because she is starting to go insane. As time goes by, this method of constant rest only seems to worsen her condition, as she begins to have hallucinations about freeing a women who is trapped behind the wallpaper in the room. This story may seem pretty easy to understand at first glance, but after taking a deeper look into the historical period that this story was written in, it can be seen that this story has multiple meanings. This is important because it shows us how the history behind this story changes its meaning from a woman who is going insane, to a woman who is trying to free herself from the restraints forced on her by society.

The story begins with a woman and her husband moving into a new home for the summer. Right away, the woman feels as if the house is “haunted” because there is something “queer” or unusual about it to her. Most people would say that these comments are just used to set the stage for what is going to happen later on in the story, which is partially true, but after doing research about the Victorian era, we can see that these words are used to describe how the speaker feels about mental asylums, because this house reminds her of one. During the Victorian era, mental asylums were basically used as prisons for the insane, because the only thing they did was shut off their patients from society, instead of helping them. This is not the only fact about why the speaker sees mental asylums as queer. 

Although they were supposed to help their patients get better, these mental asylums only seemed to make them worse because their idea of the rest method did not work. This is the case for the speaker in the story who is told by her husband and brother, who are both physicians, to rest as a method to cure her insanity. This state of constant rest without work only drove her even further into the depths of insanity, because she did not have anything to do that could take her mind off of her insane thoughts. This increase of insanity becomes apparent, because when the woman first started staying in the room she says that “[She] never saw a worse paper in [her] life”(Gilman 301), but after being in the room for a while she says “I am really fond of the room in spite of the wallpaper. Perhaps because of the wallpaper./ It dwells in my mind so”(Gilman 304). Knowing the history behind this story allows us to see that the woman’s increasing insanity is a double entendre, because Gilman uses it highlight the fact that the rest method is not an effective way for curing the insane.

In addition to the previous one, another historical fact that changes the way that we read this story is the fact that people did not really have to be insane to be put in an asylum during the Victorian era. In fact, most of the people who were put in mental asylums were women who were seen as threats to their family’s households. Since the woman in the story is pregnant, she is seen as a threat to the families household because she is unable to control her emotions. Therefore, the men in the story think she is going insane, which causes them to shut her off from society until she gets better. Gilman uses this to show how uninformed the medical system was during the Victorian era, because if a woman was pregnant they thought that she was going insane because of her mixed emotions.

Women during the Victorian era were restricted from doing anything other than being a housewife. Whenever they tried to do something other than being a housewife, they were immediately shut down by the men during this time. Gilman shows this in the beginning of “The Yellow Wallpaper” when the woman says “I did write for a while in spite of [the men]; but it does exhaust me a good deal having to be so sly about it, or else meet with heavy opposition”(300). Here, the woman talks about how she wants to write, but the men do not want her to write because they do not want her to say anything radical. When the woman says that she will be met with “heavy opposition” if she is caught writing behind the men’s back, it is a double entendre for how the radical women writers of the time were ridiculed for their rebellious ideas about equality for women. It can also be a double entendre for how Gilman would have been ridiculed if the men found out about the sly technique of hiding the true meaning of her story under a façade. This is an example of how history can effect the way that this story is read, because without knowing the history about women writers and how they were treated during the Victorian era, we would not know that the woman’s statement about being ridiculed for writing was a common to women writers during this era.

Finally, the fact that women felt oppressed by men during this time, since they were not allowed to work for a living like men could, also shows how history can change the way that “The Yellow Wallpaper” is read. Gilman gives an example of this oppression when the speaker in the story starts to see a woman moving around behind the wallpaper. The speaker is scared of the woman behind the wallpaper at first, but after another day of rest, she feels the need to free the woman by tearing down the wallpaper. Once the woman tears down the wallpaper she says “I don’t like to look out of the windows even—there are so many of those creeping women, and they creep so fast./  I wonder if they all come out of that wallpaper as I did”(Gilman 311)? This is a double entendre that not only shows how the woman has been driven completely insane because she thinks that she came from behind the wallpaper; but it is also an example used by Gilman to show how she, as well as other women during this time wanted to be free from the imprisonment imposed on them by the patriarchy that controlled society during the Victorian era. 

In conclusion, “The Yellow Wallpaper” is a short story written by Charlotte Perkins Gilman about a woman who is shut off from the outside world, because she is deemed insane by the male characters in the story. Gilman uses the description of the house as a comparison to the ineffectiveness and absurdity of the mental asylums of the time. She points out their absurdity by showing how the woman is shut off from society because of her mood swings caused by her pregnancy; and she highlights their ineffectiveness by showing how the rest method only made the woman worse over time. Gilman also points out how the woman being trapped behind the wallpaper, is a symbol for women being imprisoned from society when the speaker becomes the woman behind the wallpaper. These double entendres could not have been found without having knowledge about the Victorian era. This shows knowing the history behind a story can completely change how it is read.

