The Yellow Wallpaper

By: Charlotte Perkins Gilman

Brad Schmidt
Jared
Jamie
 Overview of Yellow Wallpaper and about the Author

•Gilman suffered from neurasthenia after she had her

daughter. This disease is characterized by depression and
fatigue but was not linked at the time to the depression some
women experience after having a baby or postpartum
depression. Her “unsuccessful prescription”
(gradesaver.com) from Silas Weir Mitchell lead her to write
“The Yellow Wallpaper”.
•After Gilman had written “The Yellow Wallpaper” she decided
to write an explanation of her purpose or so-what behind the
story. She says that she based it on her own personal
experiences through this disease and “it was not intended to
drive people crazy, but to save people from being driven crazy,
and it worked.” (Gilman, “Why I wrote Yellow Wallpaper”)
•Here is a quote from that passage that helps explains
why Gilman had to publish another article in order to
explain why she wrote “The Yellow Wallpaper”.
•“[A] Boston physician made protest in The Transcript.
Such a story ought not to be written, he said; it was
enough to drive anyone mad to read it. Another
physician, in Kansas I think, wrote to say that it was the
best description of incipient insanity he had ever seen,
and--begging my pardon--had I been there?” (Gilman,
“Why I wrote Yellow Wallpaper”)
•This quote shows how doctors and physicians during the
19th and 20th centuries thought that they knew what diseases
or illnesses women were contracting and how to treat them.
They also did not take the opinions of the women, even
about their own health very seriously.

•The female oppression in medicine is obvious in The

Yellow Wallpaper when ever the narrator would try to talk to
her husband about how she felt or what she thought she
should do and these comments were brushed aside as if they
were not worth anything.
•Also Gilman expresses her feelings about how the “rest
cure” that she had been prescribed by “the esteemed
physician Silas Weir Mitchell” (gradesaver.com) It did not
help her but had a reverse effect and saved herself by “using
the remnants of intelligence that remained, and helped by a
wise friend, [she] cast the noted specialist's advice to the
winds and went to work again--work, the normal life of
every human being”. (Gilman, “Why I wrote Yellow
Wallpaper”)
•Gilman was able to alter medical practices with The Yellow
Wallpaper and says that she has “saved one woman from a similar
fate--so terrifying her family that they let her out into normal
activity and she recovered.” (Gilman, “Why I wrote Yellow
Wallpaper”) She was also using it to represent the oppression of
women in a masculine society.

•Also the doctor that had applying the “rest cure” to her altered his
treatment for neurasthenia or postpartum depression.

•Gilman was later diagnosed with incurable breast cancer and she
killed herself with an overdose of chloroform rather then letting
others be in charge of her life.
•“The Yellow Wallpaper” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman is
about a women suffering from neurasthenia or postpartum
depression. She waits to work and still be productive but a
physician along with he husband and brother give her the
“rest cure” prescription.

•This is what causes her depression to escalade because she

is unable to feel productive in society but becomes a
recluse.

•The narrator is in prison. Her room has bars on the

windows and her life is controlled by a detailed schedule.

•In the end she becomes the woman in the wall that she
sees throughout the story and at this point is belong all
medical help.