“The Yellow Wallpaper” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman is a story about a woman who, shortly after giving birth to her son suffers from what is now called postpartum depression, is sent with the rest of her family and a maid to a summer home to help her recover. Here she is under a treatment widely known as the rest cure, that the author had personal experience with, requiring the woman to rest and become isolated. Documented in her journal we watch the unnamed narrator descend into madness, conveyed by her interaction with other characters, the symbolism presented, and sentence structure.
This story is told in the first person perspective of a woman who is prescribed a rest cure for what her husband, John a physician, refers to as a “temporary nervous depression (The Yellow Wallpaper 376)” and is forced to stay in her room in an attempt to heal. She has nothing to do; there is no one to talk to besides John’s sister Jennie the housekeeper who is content with being as domestic as possible, her husband, who treats his wife like a child, and Mary the nanny who takes care of the baby. So, the narrator starts to write in a journal she keeps secret from her husband who “hates to have [her] write a word (The Yellow
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Told she needs to rest, the unnamed character stays in the room for the majority of their summer vacation, coddled and treated like a child by her husband. As the story progresses, the audience watches as the woman slowly goes insane with the lack of things to do, projecting all of her attention on the horrid yellow wallpaper in the room. It is through her interaction with the other characters, symbolism, the structure of her journal entries—the narration—and the author’s experience with this sickness that we are able to see and understand why the character is driven