        Charlotte Perkins Gilman's “The Yellow Wallpaper,” tells the story of a woman (who is the narrator) who is said to be sick. Her husband who is a physician is the person who tells her that she is sick and that she needs to rest. The woman has a child and after she gives birth that is when the husband, and her brother who also is a physician tell her that she is suffering from “temporary nervous depression.” So as a diagnosis she is locked up in a room and is told not to work, the room she is in is an old nursery with peeling yellow wallpaper, bars on the windows, and the bed is heavy. Because she is isolated she turns to the yellow wallpaper for attention and she starts seeing things in the wallpaper such as women. Then at the end of the story she ends up tearing off all the wallpaper and yelling at her husband that she is free. The story of “The Yellow Wallpaper” relates to Gilman’s own life. Gilman got married in 1884 and she had a baby, and after she gave birth she went through severe depression and had to go through many unusual treatments, which is similar to the narrator in the short story. The story resonates even today with women’s rights and their experiences in that time period. For example, women are treated differently than men, and this causes women to not have as much power as men do. A woman’s issue that I am most concerned about in modern day is abortion. With President-elect Donald Trump being anti-abortion there has been much talk about what he plans to do about abortion and that he plans to appoint Supreme Court Justices who will overturn Roe v. Wade. “The Yellow Wallpaper” is a story of a woman being controlled by a man and this relates to modern day problems with abortion.

        An argument that can be made between abortion and Gilman’s short story would be the control that men feel the need to have on women and why they feel that they should have this power. With abortion, men want to have a say in whether to keep their baby or kill it, but with women they see it as their body so they should be able to have the primary say in determining the life of a child. Men think they should have a say in determining whether a child should live or die because as everyone knows a baby is not made alone, it takes two people and men think since they helped make the baby that they should be able to determine the future of the child as well. This could be because men feel threatened that women are gaining a lot of power that they can determine the future of an unborn child, and that decision is not for the men to decide which could cause a problem for them. With women having that power in abortion it could lead to women having even more rights than men, women could be able to make more big decisions and could really establish a lot of control. This relates Gilman’s short story “The Yellow Wallpaper” because the man in the story appoints himself as the higher authority over his wife. After him and the narrator have a child he tells her that she is greatly ill and that she needs to rest. He does not allow her to make her own decisions and has this higher authority over her. He also feels threatened towards his wife that is why he makes the decisions for her and does not let her do anything. The significance between the similarity of these two comparisons is that even to this day men feel that they should be able to make all the decisions or have a major part in them. In Gilman’s short story it can inferred that there is a lack of women’s rights and that men want to have all the control in every aspect over women. This can be connected in modern day because even now there is a lack of women’s rights and men still feel the need to have even more rights than them, a major right that women do have (abortion) men are trying to take away. This is because men do not want to give women too much power. By giving women the choice to keep a life or get rid of it is a big decision and men can argue that by doing this, they could get more power in making big decisions.

In Gilman’s short story, John who is a doctor and also the narrator’s husband asserts his power over his wife because she is ill, but really because of her imagination. The narrator’s husband feels threatened by his wife’s ideas which is why he tries to control her by locking her in a room. This relates to abortion rights because women have ideas that are now going global, meaning that they have a law that gives them rights toward abortion, a right that men do not have. This could be frightening to men because women’s ideas are starting to spread and it could bring women from all over the world to make their own ideas public and it would not be long until women made themselves as a threat to men. In Gilman’s short story, John tries to take advantage of his wife telling her that she is ill and that she needs rest. He also has her locked in a room with bars on the windows and peeling yellow wallpaper, and at the end of the short story the narrator rips up the yellow wallpaper and screams at her husband John saying that she is free. This relates to how men want to keep women from getting power, so in order to stop them from getting their ideas out men try and take advantage of them, but instead of saying that they are ill and that they need rest as the narrator was in the short story, they could be told that there is nothing that they can do to help or that it is something that does not concern them. That takes away women’s rights to ideas because no one will listen to them. It also symbolizes women breaking away from men’s control because the narrator steps over her husband to leave the room showing that she is free from her husband’s control. The narrator was so fed up with how her husband was treating her that she could take anymore and decided to take matters into her own hands. This relates to women because if men keep pushing them to their limits, after so much stress they are bound to lash out against people and will take matters into their own hand. 

In “The Wall Street Journal,” Donald Trump talks about the federal funding for abortion saying that he is going to “withhold federal funding from Planned Parenthood” (Reinhard, 2016). By doing this, this would take away from women by them not having the knowledge to know about their bodies, abortion, and what they can do to help themselves and knowledge is power. This relates to “The Yellow Wallpaper” because the narrator did not have the knowledge to help herself she felt trapped and her husband was able to take advantage of her. The narrator was trapped in a room surrounded by the yellow wallpaper and because she did not have the knowledge to help herself she had no choice, but to listen to what her husband said, and it drove her insane. On the other side with abortion funding, since women would have no knowledge on what to do with their bodies they would have no way of knowing what is and what is not good for them.

In Paula A. Treichler’s article “Escaping the Sentence: Diagnosis and Discourse in ‘The Yellow Wallpaper.’ “ She talks about medicine being male dominated and abortion is women dominated. This makes a conflict because men want to be the dominant for everything. This relates to “The Yellow Wallpaper” because John assumes himself as the dominant over his wife and wants to remain the dominant. In Treichler’s article, she says “A medical diagnosis is a verbal formula … the diagnosis of hysteria or depression, conventional ‘women’s diseases’ of the nineteenth century, sets in motion a therapeutic regimen.” This is a man giving a diagnosis to a women, and this is man created. Hysteria is man created for women because they did not know what women had to go through with their bodies. This relates to abortion because men do not have any idea what women go through mentally and physically when it comes to abortion. In order for men to better understand this, they came up with diagnosis such as hysteria, which was an excuse to just tell women when they were not acting themselves. Now, men can control women through legislation. An example of this would be getting rid of abortion so that all men would have control over women's bodies. This relates to “The Yellow Wallpaper” because the narrator is told that she is greatly ill, her husband who is a doctor diagnosis her with an illness that she is not aware of and has no idea what it is. Because of this, the doctor is able to take control of the narrator by locking her up in a room, making her not write, or allow for visitation.

In Gilman’s short story, at the very end, the narrator goes insane, screaming at her husband saying that she is free. This is because she was deprived of her rights by her husband. She was locked up in a room, and she was told what she could and could not do. This relates to abortion because if it were to be illegal, then this would take away from women’s rights and would make women feel as if they are trapped like the narrator was, because men would tell them what to do and would have more control over them.

In Claire Wilson’s article, she talks about women being punished for needing an abortion, Wilson states “... abortion law is so archaic and bureaucratic it almost suggests we are making the process as difficult as possible to punish women for ending up in this situation” (Wilson, p.1). In this article Wilson talks about women possibly being punished for having themselves go through abortion. Considering that the Congress is majority male, it can easily be inferred that they have the ultimate power to make laws about what women can or cannot do with their bodies, by doing this men are taking away women’s rights. This relates to “The Yellow Wallpaper” because the narrator’s husband could represent the Congress in modern day in terms of having the absolute power over his wife and being able to dictate what she can and cannot do, and he does this by telling her she cannot work or write, and making her stay in a room until she is “cured.” In the short story the narrator says “There comes John, and I must put this away, — he hates to have me write a word”(Gilman, 649). This is a direct example of the unfair restrictions that her husband put on her, and this relates to Wilson’s article because she talks about women being possibly punished and if John was to see his wife writing, she could have possibly been punished.

In Paula A. Shumaker’s article, she says “For John, mental illness is the inevitable result of using one’s imagination,” (Shumaker, 592).  She goes on to say “ By trying to ignore and repress her imagination, in short, John eventually brings about the very circumstance he wants to prevent” (Shumaker, 590). This means that by John trying to keep his wife (the narrator) from using her imagination, he actually ends up pushing her mentally to use it. This relates to abortion because the president-elect and his associates want to repeal Roe v. Wade. By doing this, this could cause women all throughout the United States to riot, and this would not be good for men because the very thing they are trying to stop, women’s power, would be extremely hard to stop.

In “The Yellow Wallpaper,” the narrator rebels against her husband by finally thinking for herself and lashing out on him, she then steps over him to leave the room that she was locked in by him. This relates to women and abortion because if men keep trying to take the right away from women to have abortion, this could cause a rebellion against men, because a lot of women will be outraged that a major right that they have is taken away from them and this could cause chaos in the world. 
