
Charlotte Perkins Gilman was, “widely hailed in her day as the “brains” of the woman’s movement,” and she used her writings to express her unrest and concerns of the socioeconomic status of women in the Victorian era (The Carolina Reader 299.) In her story “The Yellow Wallpaper,” Charlotte Gilman depicts a young woman who has a history with nervousness, and her husband who is as physician rents out an estate for them to live while the narrator undergoes her treatment for her mental condition. As the narrator is forced to remain in her bed while performing no stimulating activities at all, she becomes fixated on a woman she sees in the wallpaper of the room, and she eventually goes insane trying to free the woman from the wallpaper. “The Yellow Wallpaper” was Gilman’s way of speaking out against gender equality injustices of her time and her personal experience with the rest cure, and after close reading the text it is apparent that she was using the text to protest the misogyny and gender inequality that caused the disappointing role of women in Victorian society, the tendency of the men of the household to keep women retained to their homes when they needed to be placed in an asylum, and the use of the rest cure to treat hysteria in female patients.

Gilman wrote “The Yellow Wallpaper” during the beginning of a women’s rights movement where middle-class women began campaigning for women’s rights in the middle of the nineteenth century because they were unhappy with the role women played in the economic, political, and social issues.  These women were raised to stay at home and to find happiness with a good husband and a happy family. This relates to the narrator being confined to the house and remaining submissive to everything her husband orders her to do because she believes that the man of the house knows best. Women’s rights were also suppressed because, “A decent education followed by waged work was recognized as the key to financial independence, but educational opportunities were restricted and paid work was considered demeaning for middle-class girls” (Owen 2.) The lack of freedom for women to become educated further solidified their role of remaining chained to a life in the household and prevented them from entering the workforce which stripped them of even more freedoms. Charlotte Perkins Gilman wrote this story of a woman driven to madness from her lack of freedom to speak out against the gender inequality of her time period and to advocate for greater rights and privileges for the Victorian woman. The narrator is stripped of her free will as the man of the house orders her to remain bedridden without the simple rights of being able to read, write, or even feed herself which leads to her fixation on the wallpaper in her room. She sees a woman trapped within the wallpaper because she is actually seeing a reflection of herself; the narrator feels as though she is imprisoned within the nursery room, and her attempts to free the imaginary woman are actually attempts to free her own mind. Gilman writes about the narrator trying to free herself from the imprisonment of her room because it symbolizes all of the women who are driving themselves mad due to their lack of freedoms, and she is calling out for women to break free from their traditional role in the household.

Gender inequality not only existed within the middle class stay at home daughter demographic, but also with the clinically insane women. Women that came from rich and esteemed families, like the narrator in “The Yellow Wallpaper,” were typically confined to their homes when they showed signs of nervousness and hysteria, unlike men who were sent to asylums or other mental institutions upon first signs of insanity. Preventing women from getting the help they need because their family is ashamed to send one of their own to an asylum due to a fear of tarnishing the family name is another example of gender inequality during this era, and this inclination to keep these women in their homes for treatment gives them even less freedom to pursue their dreams outside of the household. Gilman puts her character in the situation of a wealthy woman that is forced to remain inside of her husband’s estate to show readers that forcing women to be comfortable with dedicating their lives to the home no matter the circumstance was ultimately driving them towards madness. Keeping these women at home was a shame, and Elaine Showalter discusses the improving conditions and effectives of Victorian asylums when she writes, “…visitors to the Victorian asylum saw madness domesticated, released from restraint, and unnervingly like the world outside the walls” (158.) Due to reforms in asylum conditions, patients were given more freedom and this was helping to correct their conditions unlike the narrator who was forced to remain bottled up in the estate. As a feminist, Gilman wanted to depict the harm done when hysterical women were not given the proper accommodations for their conditions to show her readers that allowing the men of the family to decide whether a not their daughter or wife should be sent to an asylum was keeping them from a wonderful chance to improve their condition. The author herself battled with hysteria and was prescribed to remain bedridden for the duration of her treatment which pressed her close to insanity and she, “became even sicker” (Bassuk 245.)

Like Charlotte Gilman, most women that were prescribed the rest cure did not improve, and the majority of their conditions actually worsened. After S. Weir Mitchell had success with his first use of his rest cure on a hysterical female patient, it became common practice to administer the rest cure for women showing signs of hysteria, but it was not effective in actually treating the patient. During the rest cure treatment, the patient is required to give complete control to the doctor, and the doctor, like the narrator’s husband, gave no concern to the patients wants or personal needs because of the massive problem of gender inequality during the Victorian Era. Mitchell, the inventor of the rest cure actually showed disdain towards his female patients and this is explained when Bassuk writes, “This was particularly necessary with bedridden nervous women who, Mitchell thought, were profoundly selfish and tyrannical” (249.) The fact that the own inventor of this treatment (that was being prescribed to women all over Victorian England) viewed and spoke of women this way shows that physicians cared little for the concerns of their female patients, and this is why Gilman wrote “The Yellow Wallpaper” to speak out against the way misogyny was affecting hysteria patients and making them worse. Gillman relates the way she felt during her treatment to the narrator and her husband when she writes, “John is a physician, and perhaps-(I would not say it to a living soul, of course, but this is dead paper and a great relief to my mind)-perhaps that is one reason I do not get well faster” (Gilman 299.) The narrator is cognizant of the fact that her condition is not going to improve because, as a male medical professional, her husband believes that he knows best and his judgment is superior to the narrator’s, and he will not listen when she expresses her concerns about her psychological ailment.  As for Gilman’s note of the narrator being afraid to speak her mind and finding a mental release in writing in her journal, it shows that detracting from her free will and preventing her from expressing her worries is strenuous on her mind, and the more freedom her husband takes away from her, the closer to insanity she creeps. Gilman is trying to show her readers that the rest cure does more harm than good for women, and she is advocating for giving women the freedoms they need to keep them from going insane while they try to improve their conditions.

Gilman wrote this story at the perfect time considering it was in the middle of a women’s rights movement, and “The Yellow Wallpaper” did a lot to educate her readers on the role misogyny and gender inequality played in the treatment of hysterical females. The fact that Gilman went through the rest cure treatment herself and was driven close to insanity speaks to how deeply she felt about these issues, and it sheds new light on the vivid pictures she paints as she describes the narrator’s journey to madness knowing that Gilman herself went through the same thing her character went through. Knowing the historical and cultural context behind this story allows the reader to discover that “The Yellow Wallpaper” is more than just a story concerning hysteria, it is an outcry against the misogyny and gender inequality that plagued the Victorian era. 
