In “The Yellow Wallpaper,” the author, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, addresses many social and medical issues of the early 20th century and the treatment of mentally ill patients at the time. Drawing from her own experiences with physicians, Gilman calls for doctors to treat women equally and to give them the same attention that they would give to male patients, as opposed to superficial treatments, such as rest therapy. She also uses her story to addresses the way that mental patients were treated as a whole during the time, and argued for better treatment options for schizophrenic patients. Gilman’s short story has proven to cause a great deal of change and save many lives. 

The story “The Yellow Wallpaper” was actually inspired by an experience that the author, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, had herself. In the October 1913 issue of “The Forerunner,” a monthly women’s rights journal, Charlotte Perkins Gilman explains why she wrote her famous short story., The Yellow Wallpaper. Gilman begins the article by citing multiple times where her writing was criticized by male physicians. The first, a physician from Boston, said “Such a story ought not to be written” and that “it was enough to drive anyone mad to read it” (Gilman). Another male physician, this one from Kansas wrote and said “it was the best description of incipient insanity he had ever seen, and – begging my pardon – had I been there?” (Gilman). After describing the criticisms from the men, Gilman begins to explain the story behind the story. Gilman writes about how she had for many years “suffered from a severe and continuous nervous breakdown tending to melancholia – and beyond” (Gilman). She then describes her going to see a nervous disease specialist in 1887 after about three years of having this problem. She says that the doctor gave her the rest cure, and said “‘live as domestic a life as far as possible,’ to ‘have but two hours of intellectual life a day,’ and ‘never touch pen, brush, or pencil again’ as long as I lived” (Gilman). Gilman then talks about how she obeyed the doctor’s orders for only three months before the dullness was too much and she nearly lost her mind. Then Gilman “Cast the specialist’s advice to the winds and went to work again – work, the normal life of every human being; work, in which is joy and growth and service, without which one is a pauper and a parasite – ultimately recovering some measure of power” (Gilman). Gilman completes her piece in the journal by saying that the narrator’s situation in “The Yellow Wallpaper” is loosely based on her own experience with “embellishments and additions, to carry out the ideal” (Gilman). She then clarifies that she herself never had any hallucinations herself, and then explains how she ruthlessly sent a copy of the short story to the physician who suggested rest cure, but he never acknowledged it. She ends her journal by talking about a woman who was suffering from a similar fate the narrator was in the story, but then when her family read the book they allowed her to return to regular life and it saved her. 

After reading about why Charlotte Perkins Gilman wrote “The Yellow Wallpaper” the reader can see that her personal life had an immense impact on the story. Just like Gilman, the narrator suffers from a disease that is driven to become much worse because of her rest therapy. But unlike Gilman, the narrator is unable to recognize the way that the treatment is effecting her until it is too late, and she is driven to insanity. Gilman wanted to bring light to the way that women were not only being treated in society by regular men, but by physicians as well. She hints that the physicians think that women cannot handle themselves through a real treatment, but can only “rest.” or maybe the physicians think that women do not deserve a real treatment. This is made more glaring in the context of the story as it is the narrator’s husband who is the one suggesting the rest therapy. This shows that even the person who cares about and knows the narrator the best, her spouse, even refuses to consider some sort of real treatment for her. This proves that men of the era thought that women were unable to handle a real method of treatment.

  No matter what lens a reader looks at the situation through, all can agree that Gilmore’s piece sheds light on a particular important part of women’s rights. This is the idea that they are not getting the equal treatment that men are getting. This has hints very similar to another piece that we read in class, “Ten Days in A Madhouse” by Nellie Bly., who, in her journalistic investigation, Bly exposes how poorly the patients were treated in the Blackwell’s Island Asylum. They are similar in that the patients in the asylum are treated as though they cannot recover from their condition just like Gilman is by the physician that she saw when she was struggling mentally, and the narrator is by her own husband. Instead of being prescribed some sort of real treatment she was told to wait it out and to never return to real life, which is what makes her start to actually go mad, like Bly starts to notice herself showing signs of in the asylum. 

Gilman also exposes the way that women were treated by normal men in society. Even though John is a physician, he is also the narrator’s husband, and should want her to be happy. With this being said, John shows no regard for his wife’s attitude throughout most of the text. He can see that being homebound is driving her mad, but he doesn’t think that he should do anything about it. This goes along with the idea of the times that a woman’s place was in the home, and that they shouldn’t necessarily be out and about all of the time. It was her job to take care of the house and family, and the husband’s to be out and about. Gilman challenges this by having the narrator continuously talk about how she would be much better if she could only get out of the house and have a life, rather than being trapped.

Schizophrenia is another very important theme in “The Yellow Wallpaper” and the narrator shows many symptoms that someone suffering from schizophrenia would show. Gilman also calls for better treatment of patients suffering from mental diseases such as Schizophrenia. Schizophrenia can be defined as “a chronic and severe disorder that affects how a person thinks, feels, and acts” (NIMH). There are two different kinds of symptoms for schizophrenia, called positive and negative symptoms. “The positive symptoms are those that involve an excess of ideas, sensory experiences, or behavior. Hallucinations, delusions, and bizarre behaviors fall in this category” (Walker, Kestler, Bollini, Hochman). “Negative symptoms, in contrast, involve a decrease in behavior, such as blunted or flat affect, anhedonia, and lack of motivation” (Walker et al). Schizophrenia is also a very uncommon mental illness as “approximately 7 or 8 individuals out of 1,000 will have schizophrenia in their lifetime” (NIMH). Due to its infrequency, people had not developed a very effective way to treat it until recently. Antipsychotic medications have only been around since the mid 1950’s but are proven to be the most effective way to treat schizophrenia. There are also many supplemental ways to treat the disease along with medication, including psychosocial treatments, illness management training, and rehabilitation. However, before the dawn of medications to treat schizophrenia many patients were simply ignored or thrown into insane asylums, to never receive any valuable treatment. 

In “The Yellow Wallpaper,” the narrator suffers from many of the positive symptoms of schizophrenia including hallucinations and thought disorders. The hallucinations occur when the narrator sees the woman in the wallpaper, trying to break free from the prison she is trapped in. Which is also a symbol of the narrator herself being trapped in the house. She also suffers from thought disorders as she knows that there is something wrong with her beyond John’s diagnosis of temporary nervous depression, but she refuses to admit it. This nervous depression The narrator’s condition progresses throughout the story as her hallucinations get worse and more vivid and her thoughts get stranger and stranger. and more warped. The progression of her condition is another reference to Gilman’s own experience while she on rest therapy, because her lack of treatment is leading to an escalation of her symptoms. By doing this, Gilman is again showing another purpose of writing the story; calling for better treatment of schizophrenic patients and patients suffering from other types of mental illnesses.  

Through writing “The Yellow Wallpaper,” Gilman changed the way that female mental and schizophrenic patients were treated. Over the past century, females have become more level with men in the ways they are treated by doctors. Women have also gained more respect in society, moving from a purely domestic role, to a strong role in the public eye. Also, the treatment of schizophrenic patients has improved from ignoring their problems to actually having ways to treat them. Gilman has changed the way that women and mental illnesses are viewed as a whole in our society. 