
In The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, the narrator is suffering from depression following the birth of her child. Her husband, John, was a physician who isolated her from everyone and everything in her life by keeping her in one room of their home. She was told to eat her meals in its entirety, rest after eating, and never pick up a pen to write. As the narrator documents her isolated life in this short story, Gilman was not only criticizing Dr. Weir Mitchell, but also his theories. Research on the Rest Cure, Dr. Mitchell, and hysteria show that the Yellow Wallpaper may be presenting a side of hysteria in patients in a way most people wouldn’t expect. Gilman used The Yellow Wallpaper to show her readers the relationship between Dr. Mitchell’s Rest Cure and the effects of it on her marriage, her body, and her mind.

The academic journal written by Suzanne Poirier on Dr. Mitchell’s rest cure presented the thoughts that Dr. Mitchell may have been using it to hold power over the women he was treating. This can be compared to the way John treats the narrator in The Yellow Wallpaper. He isolates her from her family and basically tells her to do nothing but rest because he will send her to Dr. Mitchell if she doesn’t start to improve. The narrator is suffering from depression but John belittles her and her condition daily. She believes that writing helps her stay mentally stable, but John and her sister-in-law do not approve. She does her best to hide it, and becomes very good at hiding it, but staying in the same room by herself every single day starts to take a toll on her mind. After being isolated for quite some time, she begins to believe there is a woman living in the wallpaper and progressively grows fond of it, as it is the only thing that stays constant in her daily routine. 

Each day John continues to make light of her concerns putting her down even more and making her cling more to the wallpaper. At the beginning of the story, the narrator is repulsed by the wallpaper describing it as strange with a formless pattern. Although she starts out not liking it, the wallpaper is one of the few things that is always there for her each day. As John is out and about working and taking care of their child, the narrator’s sister-in-law, Jennie, visits occasionally, but she thinks the wallpaper is the only thing she can trust. It doesn’t leave her, force her to stay in the room, or make her feel like she can’t do what she wants with her own life. In Poirier’s academic journal she states that Dr. Mitchell never forgot throughout his research that the body and mind were closely related. He was a firm believer that once you healed the body, you also heal the mind. Which is why almost all of his patients were to stay in their beds twenty-four hours out of the day. He truly believed it would help them improve their health.

Dr. Mitchell’s theory on healing the body included massages, electricity, diet, and of course, bed rest. In Poirier’s academic journal, she makes Dr. Mitchell come across as sensitive to his female patients but occasionally too much to the point where they did not want to go to him. This can be related back to the Yellow Wallpaper because John used the threat of sending the narrator to the doctor to keep her in the room resting, and it worked because visiting Dr. Mitchell was the last thing she wanted to do. John tells the narrator throughout the story that he believes she is improving, but he’s unaware that she rarely sleeps and never really has much of an appetite. 

Research on the rest cure presents the thought that it isn’t accurate in all medical situations. Dr. Mitchell had two categories of patients: those who followed his advice and those who did not. The narrator in The Yellow Wallpaper was suffering from postpartum depression and isolating her from everyone and everything in her life wouldn’t do anything other than make it worse. The relationship between Dr. Mitchell and his patients, and John and his wife was very similar. Isolating the narrator and other women was their way of holding power over them while they did whatever they wanted. The narrator was expressed as being paranoid about it in the story, but she believed that she was being held in this room while her husband cheated on her. As a physician, John should have recognized the narrator was declining throughout the treatment mentally and physically. As for the narrator, she knew it was taking a toll on her mind, and she could do nothing other than suffer through the isolation in hopes that she would improve and return to her regular daily routine after they moved out of the summer vacation home. 

Each time the narrator discusses leaving the summer house or displays an interest in the wallpaper, John quickly silences her as if he knows everything that’s best for her, but he is only making her condition worse. By the end of the story, the narrator has gone completely insane, and is positive there are women living in the wall. When John walks into the room one day and witnesses the extremity of her condition, he faints in the doorway and the narrator says she “creeps over him every time.” By John treating her as incompetent and not actually severely sick, the narrator is the one who suffers from it. She loses control over her mind and becomes physically sick while John gains a sense of power and authority by getting her to do whatever he says, just like Dr. Mitchell does to his patients. In Poirier’s academic journal Dr. Mitchell says, “The moral world of the sick-bed explains in a measure some of the things that are strange in a daily life, and the man who does not know sick women does not know women.” This statement explains many of John’s actions throughout The Yellow Wallpaper by suggesting that he wasn’t a good physician if he didn’t force his “sick” wife to be on bed rest.

In other research, the rest cure was presented as a treatment for women who were believed to be incapable of taking care of themselves and needed help at all times. They were basically treated as helpless. This theory supports Dr. Mitchell’s need for authority because the women that even slightly resisted his treatments were deemed incapable of help because he wasn’t fully in control of them. The research from Julie Hepworth’s The Social Construction of Anorexia Nervosa also shows that the electrotherapy Dr. Mitchell prescribed to bedridden patients would occasionally wipe out the patient's memory and change who they were completely. This was a tactic used for Dr. Mitchell’s control because although he would convince them they were getting better, they would actually be losing their mental capacities. Through the altered diet and constant rest, their bodies were also altered. For the overweight women, they would be given skim milk, but the underweight women would be given multiple servings of fattening milk to increase their body weight. These tactics are multiple ways Dr. Mitchell used his rest cure to control all aspects his women patients. 

The Yellow Wallpaper, Poirier’s academic journal, and Julie Hepworth’s The Social Construction of Anorexia Nervosa all worked with each other to reveal Dr. Mitchell's’ rest cure may not have been used for the reasons he proposed. In the long run of things he used it to gain control over women while the patients suffered thinking there was no other way to gain their mind and body back. Gilman used The Yellow Wallpaper to criticize Dr. Mitchell and his theories that were later proven by scientific research to be inaccurate treatment. 