The Yellow Wallpaper, by Charlotte Perkins Gilman is a story about a woman who moves into a mansion for the summer as she undergoes the rest cure. The rest cure was a common cure for various mental illnesses during the late nineteenth century. The story begins by telling that the narrators husband is a physician, and that he was the person that originally prescribed her the rest cure. The narrator is told to stay in one room that has nothing but a single bed in it and to do nothing except sleep, as the story progresses the narrator becomes increasingly obsessed with the wallpaper in this room. She describes an odd mark on the wall where something seems to have rubbed up against it, and she thinks that she sees faces in the patterns of the wallpaper until she starts to go crazy tearing the wallpaper off in an attempt to free the person she believes is trapped inside it.

The idea behind writing The Yellow Wallpaper was to criticize the rest cure for what Gilman believed it to be, a flawed idea that instead of helping people actually further hurts their mental state. According to Ellen Bassuk’s article on the rest cure it was a treatment first made for fatigued soldiers during the late nineteenth century. The rest cure involved confining the patient to their bed while feeding them a fat rich diet and stimulating their muscles with massage, electrotherapy, and hydrotherapy to prevent muscle atrophy while avoiding tiring the patient. However, later the cure was used to treat people with various nervous disorders that physicians did not otherwise have a treatment for. The idea behind the treatment was that by removing the patient from their normal lives that caused them to become like this, and removing almost all outside stimulus from their lives the brain would be able to heal itself of these psychological disorders. Also, it was believed that giving the patient a diet rich in fat would provide their bodies with the nutrients needed to heal their minds. During that cultural time period medicine was not very far along, and the knowledge of the human mind was even further behind, so treatments that benefitted the patient’s physical appearance were often assumed to benefit the mind. 

Bassuk also brings it to the reader’s attention that during that era women were expected to be inferior to, and dependent on men. Women were expected to live the domestic lifestyle, to run the household and focus on the needs of their husband and children, but just like today some people weren’t prepared for a large amount of responsibility that comes with taking care of a family. Sometimes the stress got to these women and they would become bedridden, which in turn excused them from their jobs and ensured that others would care for them. These examples support the idea that Gilman attempts to make, the idea that the rest cure was not used only to help people suffering from disorders but to reinforce the Victorian era idea that women should be submissive to men. The way the rest cure called for women to do nothing but sleep in an empty room to be bathed and fed by other people, it is almost obvious that it makes the woman more dependent on the doctors and nurses, and once released from their treatment they become dependent on their husband.

In a paper addressing the negative effects associated with excessive periods of inactivity Michael Sharpe, and Simon Wessely identify that the rest cure may not have been a suitable solution for the illnesses it treated. The article states that “Studies of the effects of prolonged inactivity in healthy volunteers…have confirmed that the adverse physiological effects are both profound and prolonged”(Sharpe & Wessely, 796). This is clear evidence that while in the Victorian era people’s outward appearance may have seemed to benefit from the rest cure, their bodies were actually suffering from this form of treatment. The authors go on to explain that when a person has little to no physical exercise for long periods of time the body begins to show loss of strength, further fatigue, and not surprisingly the person experiences poor sleep. This evidence supports Gilman’s idea behind The Yellow Wallpaper that the rest cure was a dangerous and largely ineffective treatment by enforcing the idea that her “nervous weakness” was something indicating a hazard to her health, not just a side effect of the treatment. 

Also, Sharpe and Wessely go on to identify that neither was the extreme opposite of the rest cure a healthy form of treatment for these types of illnesses. While aggressive rest therapies were thought to be an unsafe for of treatment “Aggressive exercise therapy may be as unhelpful as aggressive rest therapy”(Sharpe & Wessely, 796). The paper states that this conclusion was not reached through scientific evidence and experiments but through observing that it was used by people who believed these illnesses are not caused by a psychological disorder but were the result of the person just being lazy. While this conclusion doesn’t have any hard evidence to support it, it is acceptable to assume that if resting for excessively long periods of time with no physical exercise can be harmful the same could be said for excessive an exercise therapy treatment.

With today’s science and knowledge of the human body we have been able to determine that Mitchell’s rest cure was ineffective at curing psychological illnesses, although it appeared to help the patient’s physical appearance. Gilman’s story was written in an attempt to bring to light the negative effects of the rest cure that she saw, her main point was that instead of helping the patients mental state it worsened it. This point was valid because as stated, the rest cure caused the patient to become dependent on others for everything including food and bathing. Gilman successfully identified the fact that the rest cure did not help its patients, but push upon them and strengthen the Victorian ideas that women were to be submissive and reliant on men for many things.
