Charlotte Perkins Gillman was a great intellectual of her time and a prolific writer.  However, this productivity and lack of domesticity doomed her to be institutionalized regardless of her actual mental state.  At the time of her writing any female who did not embrace the social stigma of a life of domesticity was considered to be mad and at the very least would be sent to the doctor just for trying to find purpose in their life.  Today these practices of the top doctors and psychologists would be seen as lunacy, but at the time it was completely regular and the treatments were even worse than the diagnoses.  In the Yellow wallpaper John should be very helpful to Charlotte seeing as he is a doctor.  However, John not only inhibits the narrator from getting better, he is making her worse and get even more sick because his incorrect patriarchal world view restricts his wife from being a healthy person because he believes females should only be domestics.

At the time, Gillman was writing the social norm was for men to go work and earn money while women embraced a role of domesticity and looked after the kids.  Charles Rosenburg talks about how males were allowed to try and achieve their dreams and become anything they wanted, but females were not afforded the same luxary.  Any female who did not want to follow the convention of a patriarchal society was considered crazy or insane, and could often be institutionalized.  Men dominated society both socially and economically.  Often times females were only allowed to join the work force if permitted by their husbands because the family needed the extra income.  However, the overwhelming majority of females at the time were forced into a life of domesticity and were made to be stay at home moms.  This stigma that females should just be domestics and not join the workforce lasted well into the 1950’s.  This social convention itself could make women sick.  Often times women would become depressed due to the lack of intellectual stimulation.  Because of the patriarchal society that women had to live in at the time it made conditions even worse for them, especially for mental disease.  They were seen as mad if they tried to be productive or stimulate themselves intellectually.  They could be institutionalized for demonstrating such behaviors that at the time would have been seen as lunacy for women.  However, if they did not engage in such activities such as writing or having a productive role in the work place the boredom would drive them to madness.  Either way women tried at the time they could be institutionalized.  Either for depression because male suppression prohibited them from doing anything or because they were seen as insane by a male dominated society for trying to actually be productive.  This male dominated society caused many females to be institutionalized that never would have happened had society not been such a strong patriarchy (Rosenberg 133-135).

However, there was not just a problem with too many females being institutionalized there was also a problem with the institutions themselves.  Even all female institutions were dominated by males and all the treatment was decided by healthy white males who lived in a male dominated society.  Part of the reason Gillman cannot get the help she needs is because the doctors and psychologists who run the institution do not know what kind of treatment she needs.  Most males, especially evident in the yellow wallpaper, believed that if the female would just get over her sickness that she would be better.  In a sense stating that she should just toughen up and she would get over whatever ailment plagued her mind.  

Another reason these male psychologists were unable to help is because many of them did not take the females seriously in their claims.  Gillman’s treatment is very evident of this fact.  Her treatment is not making her better it is making her worse.  Being forced to sit down all day and do absolutely nothing would be absolute torture. According to Virginia Hiday and Andrew Scull many sane women went to institutions, and the results showed them getting worse not better. The fact Gillman was unable to stimulate her own mind probably drove her to a point of insanity, that was not there when she checked in for treatment.  Another reason she was unable to get help is because of the social views of the doctor who was helping her.  He was the leading psychologist at the time and his treatment techniques were renowned by others in the profession as the best.  Dr. Mitchell’s viewpoint on sexual roles can be seen is his cures for the mental illness of each sex.  If a man had a mental illness often times he was given the west cure, a treatment where a man is sent to the frontier to preform manly tasks until he recovers and can come back to civilization.  However, all females received the rest cure, where they essentially became vegetables until they were pronounced cured.  This shows the problem with psychology and medicine at the time because everyone else in the field was a white male who held the exact same social views.  These social views that women should be domestics is the driving force behind why women would go to institutions and never get better.  The treatment they would prescribe to women would always be something along the lines of rest upwards of eighteen hours a day and never stimulate your mind, do anything intellectual, and under no circumstances ever were they allowed to write or even think about the idea of writing.  By today’s standards that treatment option is the fast track to depression.  This created a problem in the institutions because the people who were trying to help the patients, especially the females, were so far distant from them.  Certainly, if there had been more women in medicine and psychology at the time much less women would have been institutionalized and they would have spent a lot less time in the institutions.  In fact if these patients had just been listened too and respected like a normal human many women would have been spared lots of time in the institutions. (Hiday, Scull 606-607).

The narrator herself was directly affected by this patriarchal society of the19th century.  

First of all, in today’s society she most likely never even would have been institutionalized.  

Gillman was seen as out of the ordinary because she did not comply to a social convention that women could not be intellectuals at the time.  She was a prolific writer, and this doomed her.  

Had there been absolutely nothing wrong with her she most likely still would have been institutionalized because a productive female at the time was considered mad or clinically insane. 

This was not the only problem with the institutions as the time though.  Then there was the manner of the institution and its treatment methods.  She was being treated to by doctor S. Weir Mitchell.  He was the foremost psychologist of the time, especially when it came to treatment of patients.  His rest therapy was seen by others as revolutionary and a great advance for medicine.  However, everyone else in the field, just like Mitchell, was a white male who believed females should fill a role of domesticity.  His revolutionary treatment options notable rest therapy did not make his patients better it made them worse.  It just made them more domestic which in his eyes and the eyes of the other professionals at the time meant that the females were getting better the more domestic they got.  Gillman knows that this treatment is not good for her, she even states that the treatment is making her worse.  Perhaps if Gillman was never institutionalized and just kept going about her life in the same manner as before she would have gotten much better very quickly.  However, her treatment probably made her stay in the institution much longer than she should have.  It also probably made her depressed and it certainly lessened her mental state.  She was worse off going to the institution because of how they were run and how treatment was handled at the time (Gillman 302-303).

Another large contributing factor to the narrator’s health is John.  John is perhaps the most influential force on the narrator’s health.  Unfortunately, John impacts Gillman’s health in a negative way as well.  He does not mean to do this, but because of the nature of medicine and social convention at the time he was doomed to make her condition worse.  John is not only the narrator’s husband he is also a doctor which gives him supreme power in the narrators medical life.  He believed he knew what was best for her.  Certainly, according to other professionals at the time he did know what was best for her.  However, his thoughts on medicine at the time and what treatment options should be taken were misguided.  The narrator herself even knows John is making her worse, or at the very least he is the reason she is not getting better.  John agrees with Mitchell that rest therapy is the best thing for the narrator.  However, this was the absolute worst thing for the narrator.  Had she been able to stimulate her mind and be productive she most like would have gotten better quite quickly.  However, this was not the case she rested for most of the day and was not allowed any stimulating activity.  John was also a believer in the fact that if she would only get over her ailment and just be strong she would be fine.  However, the narrator, at least by the time she was in the institution, had a serious problem.  At the crux of the problem, however, was John and his inability to get the narrator proper treatment because he believed he knew what was best (Gillman 299-300).

Gillman and other females were set up for failure at the psychological level.  Because the social norm was a role of domesticity for women any female who wanted to be more than just a stay at home mom could be institutionalized.  Women were punished for having ambition just because of a social stigma.  Then there was the idea of medicine itself.  Women could not get the help the needed because of men in medicine that believed women should not have any desires other than to embrace domesticity.  Then in the case of Gillman there was John.  Who on the surface should have helped Gillman because he was a doctor and her spouse.  However, he made things worse for Gillman.  Had she been single, or married someone not in medicine she most likely would have gotten better much quicker.  However, John doomed her not to his own fault, but because of social convention at the time.  
