The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman is an insight into the oppression women faced in the nineteenth century. The story gives a first-hand experience of the rest cure, something Gilman and many other women suffered through. Gilman writes a feminist criticism on the rest cure, challenging the social behaviors of the nineteenth century, and uses symbolism to express the narrator’s loss of identity and sanity. 

The story was written in eighteen ninety-two, a time in which women were restricted in their rights. Women were expected to take care of the household by cooking, cleaning, and caring for the children. The main role of a woman was to reproduce and that highly influenced how men viewed and treated women. In the Victorian era, men were seen as dominant over their wives by making all of the decisions and making the money. Gilman’s main character exemplifies this by having no say in what happens in her life, she says that “I wanted the room downstairs… But John would not hear of it” (Gilman 300). The control that John has over his wife from locking her in a room and controlling what she does, exposes the oppressive patriarchal society of the nineteenth century. In Regina Morantz’s essay about modernizing women she explains that women were starting to reject the ideas of the Victorian era and started a ‘health reform’ by empowering women to regain control over their bodies (Morantz 493). This movement taught women how to make decisions themselves, such as having a say in how many kids they wanted to have and educated them about their bodies and health. Morantz describes women as “neither a toy nor a slave, but a help-meet to a man” saying that they are no longer submissive and powerless, but an aid in the household, eventually gaining worth (Morantz 495). The movement towards modernizing and empowering women caused conflicts and some men did not agree with their new found sense of freedom. In order to regress back to the social ‘norm’ of things, doctors such as Weir Mitchell proposed something called the ‘rest cure’.

 The rest cure was famous for taking women who had nervous disorder symptoms such as hysteria or neurasthenia and shipping them off to seclusion where they are to do nothing but eat and sleep. Weir Mitchell believed that “women were irreversibly constrained by their bodies and should not aspire beyond traditional domestic roles” (Bassuk 252). His strong beliefs in the domestication of women went along with his harsh treatment which had the sole purpose of putting women back in their natural state. The treatment called for almost complete isolation, and  no means of expressing thought or any physical labor. Women were confined to foreign places with no sort of entertainment or purpose to life except to eat and stay in bed. The treatment was designed to subdue women back to the original ideas of the Victorian era; where they were unable to care for their children and had no purpose other than to reproduce (Bassuk 254). For some women the treatment worked, but for others it drove them completely mad such as Gilman’s narrator in The Yellow Wallpaper. The cure was not for nervous illnesses, it was an excuse for men to regain dominance over women and try to take back the control. This didn’t work with women such as Gilman because of the “opposing desires” to change the traditional roles in society (Bassuk 253).

Gilman uses the narrator in The Yellow Wallpaper to illustrate the struggles that women faced while under the rest cure. For the narrator, the treatment drove her to ultimately lose her sanity by imagining the woman was freed from the wallpaper. The symbolism of the lack of freedom relates to the ideals of the Victorian era and how women were not to be independent, but instead to belong to the man. The narrator compares the room to a nursery juxtaposing the ideals of women being infantile and unable to think and provide for themselves. This relates to the narrator remaining nameless in order to show the dependence and loss of control over her life. The woman in the wallpaper represents the narrator for she is trapped in it by her husband and unable to get out. The narrator’s disobedience to John by writing in her journal and the yearning to do things she is not allowed to do shows how she is rejecting the cure instead of submitting herself. Ultimately she tears down the wallpaper in an attempt to escape her confinement and tries to regain control by relinquishing her sanity. The narrator says “I’ve got out at last… and I’ve pulled off most of the wallpaper, so you can’t put me back” representing how once society has changed and women have experienced freedom, they cannot be put back into the limited ideals of the nineteenth century (Gilman 312).  Gilman uses the narrator as a symbol for all women in the nineteenth century that were being confined by society. She shows through the narrator’s escape that women were breaking barriers and that a social change needed to continue to happen. 

The point of The Yellow Wallpaper provides a voice for women to relate to and regain the independence that is deserved. Gilman’s use of symbolism is an outlet to show how women were not treated equally and the consequences of trying to gain their rights for equality. The feminist ideas in the story encourage a change in society and to abandon the ideals of the nineteenth century oppression of women. 
