The short story, “The Yellow Wallpaper” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, tells of a women’s struggles with insanity and hysteria. She is isolated in a room with yellow wallpaper and is suffering from a hysteric mental disorder. Since the treatment in the 20th century was not very good her condition worsens. The only people she encounters are her doctor and nurse. During the story, she doesn’t see the baby we assume she has. She is most likely dealing with post-partum depression and her treatment seems to be the “rest cure”. The semi- autobiographical story takes place in 1890, a time at which women were thought to be hysteric because of their hormones. Hysteria was also thought to be the women’s uterus moving throughout her body. Most doctors had no idea how to treat mental illnesses so their methods were very extreme. The methods often included isolation and punishment of the patients causing their conditions to worsen. By the end of this story the women commits suicide by hanging herself to her bed and crawling until she dies. Her husband/doctor in the story faints and she continues to crawl over him in her hysteria. This shows that the doctor had no idea what he was doing because he would not have fainted if he had experienced health care before. To understand the difficult circumstance and details of the story, you must first understand mental illness in the time period.

To better understand this story, you first have to understand mental illness in the 1900’s. In Heather Meeks article, “Medical Men, Women of Letters, and Treatments for Eighteenth-Century Hysteria”, she describes harsh treatment methods and relationships between women and male doctors. Since hysteria was thought to only be a disease women could develop because of their uterus, men were often uneducated and took advantage of female patients. Men would abuse patients sexually and physically. Many of the treatments they were subjected to often made matters worse such as: leaches, blisters, acrid cataplasms, cold baths, and dry cupping (Meeks). Among these treatments was the rest cure; patients were put on strict bed rest for very long periods of time. This article also shows how treatment for mental illness, especially in women, has evolved over time. It started out as a thought of witchcraft and evolved to be a curse of womanhood. A change in hormones causes moodiness and they women were thought to have gone mad. When they were institutionalized, most women were not initially insane but they were pushed to insanity through mental and physical abuse. These circumstances are very similar to that of the women in the short story and it gives insight into her life. 

Women often wrote about their time being institutionalized and shared how horrible their experience was. They were discouraged from talking to the outside world or talking about their experiences. This is like the women in the story, she wrote an exaggerated autobiography of her own brief insanity. With the knowledge we have of the time period and how mistreated women were, we have a better understanding of what she went through. She was placed inside a room and was forced to be still and “rest” until she was cured. She was left alone to process her own thoughts and basically cure herself. Together, this creates a negative environment and her condition worsens. She had minimal contact with other people and her child. It is shown that when mental patients are left alone they are more likely to revert or digress. We can assume the doctor was her husband and the nurse is her only friend. This isolation was common in the 20th century and pushed many to the point of suicide. This article gives an idea of how treatment of mental illnesses effected the overall health of patients. It allows the reader to make deeper connections and to analyze the text. This understanding makes it easier to read and comprehend the text.

The second article highlights the specific problems with post-partum disorder. The article, “Fragile beginning: identification and treatment of post-partum disorders” by Millis JB and Kornblith PR, identifies specific symptoms and causes of the disorder. Background of what causes the disease is crucial to the story because it could have been a multitude of things. It was very common for women to have post-partum disorder especially after their first child. Most women would report not feeling normal and having violent thoughts towards their children. It is most common to experience post-partum within the first year of transitioning from couple-hood to parenthood. This transition is accompanied by new stresses combined with the hormones of giving birth caused some women to lose control (JB, Millis). Specifically, the woman in this story is most likely experiencing this because she talks about having a child but she never gets to hold the child. This is most likely due to the fact that is she were to give birth to a child while still mentally unwell she may bring harm to it in some way. She also experiences bipolar like behavior; she gets very angry and tries to pull off her wallpaper. She also hallucinates and has many mood swings. These symptoms, if left untreated, cause depression, anxiety, agoraphobia, and suicidal thoughts (JB, Millis). This is clearly related to the women in the story and the knowledge of symptoms allows you to make connections. It gives you information and allows you to analyze the text on a deeper more conceptual level.

Without the research that these topics provide to the reader you wouldn’t be able to deeply analyze the reading. The first bit of research gives greater insight into how women were treated with mental illnesses. Connections between how the women were treated in the past and how the woman was treated in the story are more clear through research. By researching we know that the woman in the story has post-partum disorder and that is used to comprehend her actions. She would not have ripped the wallpaper off her wall if she was in her normal mind set. But since we know that she is suffering from post-partum depression we can make sense of her seemingly unreasonable actions. She also would not have tied herself to the bed frame and walked as far as she could in a sad attempt kill herself. The articles give real life perspectives from the time frame that would have affected the theme of the story. By exploring the time period we can learn more about the people in it and why they did the seemingly absurd things they did. We can use recent texts and older information to put things into perspective and learn from their actions going forward in our own lives.
