

Charlotte Perkins Gilman wrote not only the Yellow Wallpaper which expressed her opinions on the role of the man in 19th century families but also did a follow up called “Why I Wrote The Yellow Wallpaper”. In this writing, Gilman explained why there are so many tones of feminism running throughout the short story. Gilman combats the patriarchal way of life in the 1900s by writing the feminist story The Yellow Wallpaper. 

The author suffered from nervous breakdowns that would send her into depressions. She went to a doctor in 1887 that specialized in nervous diseases. He told her that nothing was wrong with her and with that he sent her home with the advice to never do anything stimulating of the mind and to remain as “domestic in life as possible” (Gilman). After following these guidelines for three months, she was near mental ruin. After this, she decided that she would go against the “doctor” and carry on with normal work (Gilman). Writing, working and engaging in stimulating thought brought her out of her depression. In turn, she wrote The Yellow Wallpaper as the counterargument to patriarchal belittling that was so dominant during this time period. She sent the story to the physician who made her crazy and he never acknowledged it. She says that the reason she wrote the story in the first place was to “save people from being driven crazy” and it worked (Gilman). Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s short story was written to expose women’s oppression in the nineteenth century. Men during this time were often head of the house and controlled the women/wives. To keep the patriarchal system in check, many men would do anything they could to further oppress the women. This included treatment for nervous breakdowns which the author herself faced at some points. Claiming to have answers to issues that only women were facing by not only belittling them by only calling it “nervousness” rather than something more serious, such as postpartum depression, further degraded women to feelings inferior. Doctors would then “cure” women of their sickness by ordering them to sleep and not partake in any intelligent thoughts or actions. This called out the way of thinking by both the men who felt superior and degraded women with the notion that women were “simple-minded” (Gilman) and opened the eyes of women who were brainwashed into thinking that men were all-knowing. 

In an article by Beverly A. Hume, explores initially the writers that influenced Gilman. Primarily Poe is drawn into the same bubble as Gilman. While Poe’s narrators often have a sort of domestic violence attached to them, Gilman’s narrator does not do this but “has the chilling potential for domestic violence that not only haunts this tale but threatens to undermine Gilman’s stated feminist goal” (Managing). There is then a study of the word “children” and how it plays a key role in the story The Yellow Wallpaper. The narrator describes children as “ravaging” and full of “hatred” and she eventually displays this towards the wallpaper as well. She talks about her child as being an “impressionable little thing” (Managing) which mimics the language that John uses to address the narrator in as well. Gilman rejects, in The Yellow Wallpaper, the idea of the gender-biased rest cure of the nineteenth-century but also attacks gender-biased definitions of mental illness. Gilman does a wonderful job of exposing the ridiculous but widely-believed idea that women were inferior to men, and especially in the relationship of a married couple. Unfortunately, at the end, Gilman returns the heroine of the short story for feminism to the same docile, inferior woman that was present at the beginning of the story. It becomes evident that John does not create a regime to cure her of her nervousness out of love like the narrator had originally thought in the beginning but out of control and oppression. This view is relevant to the previous cited writing because of the further developed feminist view not only showing through the writing itself but in the choice of diction and how it itself effects the reader’s knowledge and understanding about The Yellow Wallpaper. 

Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s The Yellow Wallpaper brings attention to the nineteenth century way of thinking about the marital status quo. This piece of fiction is a vital defining piece for the first wave of feminism. It bluntly calls out issues that many people either refused to address or didn’t think was an actually issue that people were facing during this era. Gender norms being challenged this much in such a public way and such an extreme way, with embellishments and exaggerations, forced a lot of people to question the very framework of American conjugal life. The power that the husband/man of the house had over the women in the home was vastly contrasting. By making this a story that progresses in a chronological order, the reader watches and realizes that the woman is being oppressed when the narrator becomes aware of this as well. This suspense builds when John prevents her from writing and gives false accusations that writing is the cause of her illness. Then he further belittles her by prescribing medicines that eventually leave her as only a child-like version of herself. Gilman’s reasoning behind her making the narrator not be cured by the male-prescribed treatments was a choice to not allow them to be right. In her own treatments, it did not work. Only when she rebelled against the sleep treatment and return to working and writing was she finally cured. She did not want a message of the men being right all the time to carry on the idea of the patriarchal system. Gilman pioneered the feminist wave with this and she shifted the power from the men towards the center of the gender spectrum.  
