Something as simple as patterned paper that is glued onto bedroom walls. Something that is so simple in fact, that most people don’t even realize when it is there. Charrette Pickens Gilman Creates a short story revolving around the yellow wallpaper that is plastered in the bedroom of her summer home. This story is about a woman gone mad after stuck inside a bedroom with horrible yellow wallpaper; the less-obvious analysis is one telling a story of how all woman were treated in the late 1800’s for just naturally being a woman. Charlotte Pickens Gilman created fictional text and by using her own experiences she reveals to the world the ways woman are treated to add to the feminist movement in the late 1800’s. 

“The Yellow Wallpaper” is displayed as a journal of a woman who starts off moving into a home for the summer with her husband. This woman has been diagnosed by her husband, who is a doctor, with temporary nervous depression. She is instructed to spend as much time as possible doing absolutely nothing, otherwise known as the rest cure theory. While her husband is in charge of every detail of the couples life on top of going to work full time, our character waste away in the upstairs bedroom of the unfrimilliar home. Although the home itself is described as a beautiful colonial mansion john, the husband, confides our character in the upstairs room that she describes as anything but beautiful. With what appears to once be a baby nursery, our character will now inhabit. She describes the room to have bars on the windows, scratch makes on the walls and floors, and this ugly, yellow, ripped wallpaper that smells bad. Because of her condition this woman spends a good portion of her day annualizing the wallpaper which she writes about in her journal that john has forbidden she writes in. Over the course of out women’s thoughts that are written in her secret journal she will discuss random thoughts she has through the day like wishing her husband would let her go back out into the world or how she thinks she cries way to frequently, but she always gravitates back to the subject of the wallpaper. The wallpaper becomes her main focus becoming more prevalent in her journal as the summer goes on. She becomes so fixated on the wallpaper that at night she lays awake staring and analyzing the patterned yellow wallpaper that clings on the well. After many sleepless nights of staring, the woman determines that at night the pattern begins to move into vertical bars resembling the cell bars of a jail. Behind these bars is what seems to our character to be a woman who spends the nights crawling the length of the room rapidly. Johns goes off to work every day while our character spends her days peeling away at the already torn wallpaper until it becomes such a focus that she continues her pealing throughout the night while john sleeps. In the journal entrees our character develops the notion that she is the woman behind the bars at night and in her tone you can tell that by this point she has gone completely mad. The story concludes with our character locking herself in the bedroom only to be found by a frantic john who breaks down the door to find his wife crawling the perimeter of the room just as she saw the woman is the wallpaper do. John faints and in this psychotic break our character keeps crawling around the room and now over her husband. 

I read “The Yellow Wallpaper” without any background of the story or of Charlotte Pikins Gilman. What I discovered after doing some swift research on the author is the extreme parallels between her life and the one of the female character created in “The Yellow Wallpaper”. Gilman had a baby just one month after marring and the fictional character also has a baby mentioned briefly in the text. A few months after having her baby girl, Gilman slipped into a depression mixed with nervous breakdowns which in today’s world would have been diagnosed as postpartum depression. She was put on the rest cure theory where she spent three months slowly spiraling down a road of madness. Now Gilman never has the psychotic meltdown that her character has because she goes back to living a normal life of being a housewife, mother, working, and writing; Gilman attributes her salvation of sanity to her work of writing. 

Women in the 1800’s have less rights than a fence post in the modern day. Yet had woman been given the rights to vote, run for any position in government, or even attend university. In the late 1800’s, every woman ended up married with a family bond to the household completing the duties of cooking and cleaning; if you were so unlucky to find yourself a husband and your father couldn’t sell you off to some fool, you were stuck at home with your parents for the remainder of your life. There was no such thing as an independent woman who could conceive her own individual thoughts and ideas. The feminist movement had already had the ball rolling by the time Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper” was published but this story became much more, It became a staple of the feminist movement itself and is still used today in relation to “girl power”. In the story, the bars on the windows and the bars envisioned in the wallpaper are a metaphor of the imprisonment that woman feel inside the role of a forced housewife. Gilman didn’t understand why all of the bourdon of being a parent landed on the mother, and why woman were proceed as beings that weren’t capable of intellectual thought, or even not being able to have a job. Not only does this story advocate for the rights a humans but also makes the public aware of the damage the rest cure has on a person. Gilman sent a copy of the yellow wallpaper to the professional that treated her depression and while he never admitted to Gilman, she was told that he changes the way he went about treating woman in the same situation. 

Some critics thought Charlotte Pickins Gilman’s short story had the ability to drive people mad. Gilmans response was that “It was not intended to drive people crazy, but to save people from being driven crazy, and it worked.” Through Pickens person experience with being mistreated as a human just for being a woman she had the ability to become a strong figure to advocated for female’s rights; She created “The Yellow Wallpaper”, along with many other text, to bring to light the issues that revolved around women in the 1800’s. 
