Although marriage can be the greatest part of someone’s life, it also has a history of being the most oppressive for women. This is the main premise of the short story, “The Yellow Wallpaper” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, which was written in 1890. It primarily examines the oppressive nature of marriage, as well as, the ills of the rest cure treatment, that was often used on women who were thought to be hysterical or who wanted to stray from her domestic duties. It was written towards the beginning of the feminist movement and is often regarded as a highly impactful short story that describes the saga women had to face as wives’ in an overly domestic,  society. 

The story takes place in the narrator’s summer home in the beginning of the summer. She is with her husband and her sister- in- law, who acts as a housekeeper. In the beginning of the story, she still has her mental sanity and her creativeness, until she becomes obsessive over the yellow wallpaper that is in her room. Throughout out the story her feelings become worst and worst and she loses her creative sense and her want to write. Her husband begins to use the rest cure treatment on her, which just oppresses her and drives her crazier. She becomes even more obsessed with the yellow wallpaper and sees figures of women trapped in the wallpaper, which seems representative of her own state. By the end, she has completely lost her sense of reality and can no longer handle being trapped in the home and forced to sleep all day. She rips down the paper in an effort to set the fictitious women in the wallpaper free. When her husband enters the room he faints at the sight of her, but the narrator is barely able to recognize him and sees him as another figure that she has to climb over.

Within the story, there is a reference to a resting cure treatment, that the narrator’s husband, who is a physician, follows in order to take care of her “hysteria”. Michael Blackie discusses the full treatment that is involved with the rest cure treatment in his article “Reading the Rest Cure”. “The Weir Mitchell Rest Cure was comprised of six to eight weeks of absolute rest and isolation from family and friends, a closely monitored diet consisting mostly of large quantities of milk aimed at increasing… the body's weight, and massage and electrotherapeutics to keep the muscles stimulated and flushed with blood” (Blackie 60-61). Within the story, Gilman criticizes the rest cure treatment, since the treatment was used on herself years before. She contributes this to her own self demise and her continued madness. 

During the nineteenth century, women had no rights and were under the constant control of their husband, which made them more bound to their home. Gilman includes this in her story because it adds a feminist element and shows how marriage and domesticity contributes to women going “mad” or having mental illness. In Paula Treichler’s article, “Escaping the Sentence: Diagnosis and Discourse in “The Yellow Wallpaper”, She says, “A feminist analysis moves beyond such localized causes to implicate the economic and social conditions which, under patriarchy, make women domestic slaves.” Women during this time are constantly trapped in their domestic lives and trapped serving their husbands, which can be mentally draining.

Both of these ideas contribute to the overall theme to the story, which is that men diagnose women with fake diseases, such as, hysteria and madness to belittle their actual mental illnesses and their true emotions or desires to leave their domestic lives. “It is a male voice that privileges the rational, the practical and the observable” (Treichler 70). It is true that during this time, men were rarely diagnosed with hysteria or other diseases comparable to this; it was strictly a woman’s disease. The diagnosis for this came from a man who had no idea what women were actually feeling and who just figured they were being overly emotional. Men held the right to send their wives’ to mental asylums or to treat them however they wanted without the woman’s true feelings or emotions taken into consideration. “The Yellow Wallpaper” helped to point out these injustices and was used as a way to show the doctor who created the rest cure treatment, that it was wrong and overall oppressive.

Gilman’s purpose for writing this story is to show Mitchell the true effects that she and many other women had, when they were forced by their husbands to follow Mitchell’s resting cure treatment. She was an early feminist and mental illness advocate during a time when it was not popular to go against your husband.  
