“The Yellow Wallpaper”, a short story written in 1892 by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, is an early literary example of how women’s mental health has been ignored or improperly treated throughout the centuries. The story depicts a young woman’s descent into madness as her pleas for help are ignored and her symptoms diminished because of her status as a woman. The men in her life who care for her, her husband and medical practitioners, simultaneously claim that there is nothing wrong with her and that she is also hysterical. These conflicting narratives, as well as her confinement to a room with yellow wallpaper, sometimes interpreted as a sanatorium room, cause her to blame herself for her illness and feel guilty for having one. Furthermore, her concerns are written off as the delusions and fantasies of a “mad woman”. 

Projecting her own feelings of being trapped, she begins to believe a woman is trapped behind the wallpaper. When she first perceives the woman, she believes she is hiding in the day and trying to escape the walls by night. This is an analogy for how she can only rebel against the confines of the narrative she is supposed to fit (a domestic woman who does not suffer from mental illness) when no one is around. In the presence of her caregivers, she is encouraged to be silent, to not mention the pain she is experiencing. However, bottling up her emotions only makes her situation more dire. Eventually, she comes to believe that she has been trapped behind the wallpaper by her husband. To prevent them from “putting her back,” she pulls off all of the wallpaper and stops hiding her symptoms, freeing herself in one way while damning herself in another.

While Gilman never suffered from hallucinations, she based the main character’s struggles on her own battle with “nervous breakdowns and melancholia”. Three years into her struggle, she consulted with a man who was considered the best physician in the country. He concluded that there was nothing wrong with her and that, as treatment, she should stop participating in “intellectual activities” and live a domestic lifestyle. Importantly, the main character is also forbidden from participating in any intellectual hobbies. During this era, women were seen as inferior, and those who stepped out of the confines of what society deemed to be an acceptable woman (those who lived outside of complete domesticity and subserviency) were often labelled hysterical and committed to asylums. Gilman noted that following the instructions of her doctor to no longer write or draw nearly cost her her life, and it was only when she began to explore her abilities again that she felt better.

 When it was first published, “The Yellow Wallpaper” was met with intense criticism, which highlighted the culture of silence women were subjected to, in part due to the social expectations of women at the time. However, this piece of literature caused multiple professionals at the time to re-evaluate how to treat neurasthenia and has thus saved countless lives. Gilman summarized her experience writing this story in one sentence: “It was not intended to drive people crazy, but to save people from being driven crazy, and it worked.”

Contributing Author: Sophie Wagner

To learn more about the historical impact of this story, check out this website.

To read “The Yellow Wallpaper”, check out this link.

Image Credit: Dos by Helene Delmaire (used as cover for e-book, found here)