“The Yellow Wallpaper” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman is based off of Gilman’s own experience, which was slightly less extreme than the woman’s in “The Yellow Wallpaper.”  Gilman experienced nervous breakdowns and when she went to a doctor for it, her doctor suggested the “rest cure.”  The rest cure means exactly what it entails; to hopefully be cured by an ample amount of rest.  The treatment failed for her and it was only after she stopped the rest cure and began living life as she did before that her symptoms were cured.  The woman in her short story is treated by the rest cure as well, and she is basically locked up in a room for 3 months.  In the long run the treatment just leads to an amplification of her condition to the point in which she becomes certifiably crazy.  Gilman’s plot was influenced by knowledge of the rest cure, solitary confinement, and statistical evidence that women were more likely to be insane than men in the nineteenth century.

According to the article “The Rest Cure: Repetition or Resolution of Victorian Women's Conflicts?” by Ellen L. Bassuck, the rest cure was specifically used for “women with severe nervous symptoms” (Bassuck 245).  They would be bedridden and basically allow their doctor or caretaker to take over every aspect of their life.  This included being fed, cleaned, and even being moved around.  All tasks were done for them to prevent as much stimulation as possible.  The rest cure’s results were nothing too extraordinary; it worked for some women and didn't work for others.  There is no evidence that it was a truly successful treatment, and in Charlotte Gilman’s case, it was certainly not successful.  I believe that her negative experience with the rest cure inspired the plot to her story.  Due to her experience with the treatment, she made sure to make the woman in her story have the opposite effects of what the rest cure is supposed to do.  She made the woman start out as seemingly normal, but by the end of her isolation she went mad.  I believe she chose this outcome because she was trying to discourage women into accepting the rest cure treatment.  “The Yellow Wallpaper” makes a clear statement that isolation can easily lead to madness.

The isolation that the woman in Gilman’s short story experiences is very similar to what someone condemned to solitary confinement would experience.  “The Torture of Solitary” by Stephanie Elizondo Griest focuses on one man named Joe Loya who went through solitary confinement for 2 years.  Loya explained to Griest what it was like being alone during almost all 24 hours of the day, what he did during his seemingly endless amount of time, and how it made him feel over an extended period of time.  Because solitary confinement is basically just you, a bed, a toilet, and 4 walls, there is literally nothing to do at all.  So what Loya would do is pick a spot on the wall and just stare at it for a very long time, dialing anything else out.  Eventually, he said his mind would start to do things with the blank wall he was staring at so intently.  It would start to display images and movements and he would watch what was going on on the wall like it was scenes in a movie.  Loya explained that after doing this so many times, he would just start seeing things on the wall without even trying.  He said, “Eventually, this will happen without you even trying. Faces will appear, but without you concentrating. You just open your eyes, and a scene appears right in front of you. But then those faces, they start to morph, like in that Michael Jackson video. Only, they morph into people you don't want to see. People you f ****d over. People suffering. People in pain”  (qtd. in Griest 24). This relates back to the woman in “The Yellow Wallpaper” because she starts to think that there is a woman in her wall stuck behind the wallpaper.  At first she would only see the lady at night when she stared at the wall for long periods of time.  However, eventually she started seeing the woman in the wall all the time.  This is when she begins attempting to free the woman from the wall by ripping off the wallpaper.  Gilman included this part of the story in the manner she did because she knew how solitary confinement effects people.  Joe Loya’s experience in solitary confinement attests to her accuracy in portraying the effects of isolation on the human mind.

The fact that Gilman made the main character of “The Yellow Wallpaper” a female may relate directly to her herself being a female.  However, in the nineteenth century, it was a common belief that women were more likely to go insane than men.  The article “The Female Malady: Men, Women and Madness in Nineteenth Century Britain” by Joan Brusfield states, “… in nineteenth-century Britain madness was first and foremost a female condition” (Brusfield 259).  Statistically, toward the end of the nineteenth century, a mad person was more likely to be female than male.  This short story was written at the end of the nineteenth century, and this statistic could have influenced Gilman’s decision to make the main character female.  Stistics also showed that women were more likely to have longer stays in asylums than men at the end of the nineteenth century.  This statistic could have influenced Gilman’s decision to have the women stay isolated for 3 months.  Gilman used factual evidence to make her story as accurate to reality as possible.

Gilman’s decisions in writing “The Yellow Wallpaper” were based off of experience with the rest cure, knowledge of solitary confinement, and statistics showing more women being insane than men.  The rest cure is a treatment for insanity in which the patient literally rests until their symptoms go away.  Gilman chose to make the rest cure unsuccessful in her story because it was unsuccessful for her.  Gilman decided to make the woman see things because she was confined to a room and isolated.  This is very similar to solitary confinement, and people placed in solitary confinement for extended periods of time may start to see things; as proved in the case of Joe Loya.  Gilman chose to make the main character a woman because, statistically, in the late nineteenth century women were more likely to be insane than men.  Gilman wrote “The Yellow Wallpaper” based off of historical analysis, statistical evidence regarding women and insanity, and her own experiences with and knowledge of insanity.
