Essay On The Yellow Wallpaper Postpartum Depression

Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper,” the narrator, Jane, has postpartum depression. In order to cure this depression, John, Jane’s husband and a doctor, administer the rest treatment on her. Gilman wrote “The Yellow Wallpaper” through her personal experience. Along with writing “The Yellow Wallpaper” she wrote an explanation for why she wrote “The Yellow Wallpaper.” Depression and isolation caused by the misdiagnosis caused Jane to go insane. The rest treatment was a common form of cure for people with depression.

The author uses tone to demonstrate how the narrator’s thoughts change from the beginning to the end of her treatment. In the beginning of the story, the narrator writes, “You see he does not believe I am sick!” (647). The author knows she has slight depression, but her case is not serious enough to deserve this type of treatment. The treatments consist of locking her away in a room to rest with no working, and not even writing. The narrator secretly keeps a journal of her daily activities and this shows the serious transition into her

This symbolizes her realization of being trapped for so long, and her desire now to free herself. However, because society is cruel and who never approve of a woman so independent, she creeps around the room to hide her escape. When John arrives at the nursery-like room, he sees what has become of his wife. His wife explains she has ‘gotten out, in spite of you and Jane,’ before John faints and his wife continues to creep around the room, trying her best not to step on the fallen body. In conclusion, the narrator of the Yellow Wallpaper, is what happened to a woman in an oppressed society.

“The Yellow Wallpaper” is her best-known and important 19th century short-story dealing with the subject of madness. The story is believed to have been inspired from the real life experience of Gilman who suffered a severe depression during her decade-long marriage and “underwent a series of unusual treatments for it”. She was refused to perform any intellectual actions by her specialist Dr. S. Weir Mitchell and prescribed a complete bed rest “rest cure” for several weeks. She was prevented from pursuing her ambition as a writer and suggested to “live as domestic life as far as possible”, making her sick more than ever. Her sufferings, depression, mental trauma, and oppression, find its full eloquence in this very story where she uses madness as an agency to give voice to her mental sufferings and rebellion against the women oppression.

Living in a society lacking knowledge or proper medical procedures, it is reasonable that many people, including the narrators of the two stories, would deny their condition or try to avoid being placed in a harsh environment. Being highly misunderstood, however, mental illness was still treated as taboo. As such, those suffering disorders may not be taken seriously--especially if you were a woman. Elisabet Rakel Sigurdar outlines this issue, prominent in “The Yellow Wallpaper”: “The story depicts both the insanity of the narrator, as well as the helplessness that came with being a woman in the nineteenth century. The narrator's husband oppresses and infantilizes her, constantly belittling her needs and dismissing her concern that the treatment is only making her worse” (Sigurdar 18).

(l.42) The husband decides everything for the protagonist and thinking it’s for her own good, but eventually his methods proves to worsen her illness, she can’t even write. She also has a brother, who is a doctor that doesn’t really help her on her sickness and just orders her to rest. The poor character has two family members that should be helping her, instead they are making her worse, even though that is not their intentions. In the story, she suffers from a mental breakdown after she obsesses over a wallpaper that consumes her every moment. She starts acting paranoid because of the things she is seeing in the yellow wallpaper.

In most cases, house is a symbol of security ordinarily, a cozy place where women are in a position to express their ideas and thoughts. For those women in the nineteenth century, this is the part where makes women aware of their own choice and control over their leisure time to life and liberty rights. However, in “The Yellow Wall-paper”, the narrator loses all rights of decision and required to live in an unfamiliar environment where she is treated for her sickness with nothing to do except resting. Notwithstanding, this house is described as “a colonial mansion, a hereditary estate”(Gilman 647), she thinks this is a “haunted house”(647) and “proudly [declares] that there is something queer about

Assignment Title: Text Analysis Exercise Introduction Charlotte Perkins Gilman was best known for her writings regarding the unequal status of women within the constraint of marriage. Gilman, as a sociologist and a reformer, argued that women’s traditional role in domestic sphere confined their creativity and intelligence. The text to be analyzed here is a remarkable work of Gilman’s: the short story The Yellow Wallpaper. The story is set in 1892 and is told in strict first-person narration in the form of a journal by a woman who suffers from depression. Her physician husband, John, suggests that she should stay in a mansion in the suburbs for “rest cure” treatment.

He forbids her to write but she does it secretly, in a kind of diary, a private and hidden place where she expresses her ideas, fears, and thoughts. The room that John chooses for his wife is a reflection of this hidden desire. She wants the bedroom on the first floor, but she agreed to be in a room with yellow wallpaper. In this sense, the yellow wallpaper could be interpreted as a projection of the narrator, who from the first pages reveals her desire and need to write, but also makes us accomplices of her activity as a writer in hiding. In addition, she does not only reveal her health condition but also her repression as a writer, a profession that, even in the nineteenth century, was viewed with distrust.

So even if the woman in Walnut Creek didn't have a photo of her house in her bag, she would have had other things she could have told me about her past if I had bothered to ask her rather than interrogate her. I needed to remember that while her situation is different from mine, she's a vulnerable human like me. Thinking that Quindlen's essay was about how the homeless need a place to live like anyone else, an argument with which I now agree, the point could also be made that a unique home where one can paint a room blue or red or black is just one of many things we should provide the homeless. But certainly we can only know what the homeless need if we understand them not as "nouns" but as unique people with memories and aspirations. Quindlen mentions but doesn't focus on those who avoid shelters because of mental illness.

Craig Bartholomaus 13113 16 March 2016 Essay 2: People Need Protection from Scientist I recently finished reading The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lack, a biography about Henrietta Lacks and how human tissue was taken without consent then used for medical research. Henrietta Lacks, was a colored woman, she was the daughter of a tobacco farmer, she came from a very poor, with very little education, she died from uremic poisoning, due to the treatment for cervical cancer October of 1951 at age 31. In January of 1951, Henrietta went to Johns Hopkins Hospital because she found a knot on her womb and was bleeding and had pain in her abdomen. Johns Hopkins is known for being the best research hospital around, but Henrietta did not go because