The Yellow Wallpaper

 The Yellow Wallpaper

- Charlotte Perkins Gilman 

Author 

 July 3, 1860 – August 17, 1935

American humanist, novelist, writer, lecturer, advocate for social reform, and eugenicist.

Her best remembered work today is her semi-autobiographical short story "The Yellow Wallpaper", which she wrote after a severe bout of postpartum psychosis.

During Charlotte's infancy, her father moved out and abandoned his wife and children, and the remainder of her childhood was spent in poverty.[1]

the Perkinses were often in the presence of her father's aunts that included education activist Catharine Beecher, suffragist Isabella Beecher Hooker, and, Harriet Beecher Stowe, the author of Uncle Tom’s Cabin.

she lived a childhood of isolated, impoverished loneliness, she unknowingly prepared herself for the life that lay ahead by frequently visiting the public library and studying ancient civilizations on her own.

1884, she married the artist Charles Walter Stetson, Their only child, Katharine Beecher Stetson (1885–1979)),[12] was born the following year on March 23, 1885. Charlotte Perkins Gilman suffered a very serious bout of postpartum depression

Gilman died by suicide on August 17, 1935, by taking an overdose of chloroform. 

In both her autobiography and suicide note, she wrote that she "chose chloroform over cancer" and she died quickly and quietly.

She wrote, "There is no female mind. The brain is not an organ of sex. Might as well speak of a female liver.

Gilman believed economic independence is the only thing that could really bring freedom for women and make them equal to men

In many of her major works, including "The Home" (1903), Human Work (1904), and The Man-Made World (1911), Gilman also advocated women working outside of the home

The home should shift from being an "economic entity" where a married couple live together because of the economic benefit or necessity, to a place where groups of men and groups of women can share in a "peaceful and permanent expression of personal life."

It was also her response to Dr. Silas Weir Mitchell, the noted medical practitioner of the time, who prescribed rest cure, and was the one who treated Gilman as well. She admits to it in her essay “Why I wrote ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’” (1913) wherein she writes about the debilitating effect of such medical prescriptions which had brought her on the verge of what she calls “utter mental ruin”. 

unnamed narrator expressing her surprise at the “colonial mansion” 

John too is indulgent but carries the stamp of his male authority which gains force from his professional qualification as a doctor. As such, being a practical man, he does not entertain anything that is not palpable or empirically proven and which is why he is quick to lash out at faith or superstition. 

Jennie, John’s sister. She comes across as an embodiment of an ideal woman of her times. One is told that “she is a perfect and enthusiastic housekeeper, and hopes for no better profession”. That she too believes that it is the act of writing that has made the narrator sick is suggestive of how she has ingrained the patriarchal ideas of authorship as masculine domain

She can see a “faint figure” wanting to break from the patterns of the wallpaper that seems to have imprisoned her. The narrator moves to test it by feeling it with her hands. Soon, she starts believing that there is a “stooping and creping” woman trapped behind the patterned wallpaper. 

There are obvious pointers in the text that collapse the distinction between the two to suggest that the woman the narrator imagined as trapped behind the wallpaper and one who would crawl on the road in the daylight was a projection of her own self. 

The story ends on a note of mental breakdown of the narrator as symbolized in the animal imagery. It is also a symbolic moment replete with multiple significations.