Introduction
“The Yellow Wallpaper” is a short story by Charlotte Gilman that describes a woman with emerging symptoms of schizophrenia. It is being misdiagnosed by her husband, John, who sees it as nothing of major concern and recommends rudimentary and oftentimes damaging ways of handling it. As a result, his wife’s condition worsens over time, and she is helpless to do anything, bound to her husband’s whims and desires.
The only thing the woman can do is record her slow descent into insanity, being helpless to change anything, and continuing her journal as a show of silent defiance. The story demonstrates the inefficiency in the diagnosis as well as the treatment of severe mental health deficiencies in women. Thus, Gilman’s story emphasizes how mental health conditions faced by women were not prioritized, with doctors believing that they were intricacies of the female body, and women not receiving proper treatment.
Symptoms of Illness in the Story
The story focuses on the protagonist, a young woman who shares her experience with hysteria, a common condition with which women were diagnosed at the time. As a result, her husband, John, has decided to move for the summer, where the calming environment could heal his wife (Gilman 648). As the story progresses, the reader learns more about the woman’s surroundings and the yellow wallpaper in the master bedroom. The heroine mentions that the wallpaper is “dull enough to confuse the eye in the following, pronounced enough to constantly irritate and provoke study” (Gilman 648). However, while some might think that such details are trivial, they are, in fact, important since it is the wallpaper that is directly linked to the well-being of the woman.
The author uses the voice of the woman as the narrator in order to show the story from her perspective. As seen later, the woman’s condition starts to deteriorate, and she starts to feel “awfully lazy, and lie down ever so much” (Gilman 651). With her feeling of constant lethargy, she begins to believe that “there are things in that paper that nobody knows but [her], or ever will” (Gilman 652). What once was boring wallpaper to her was now becoming alive.
However, the climax of the narration is the heroine believing that a woman was in the wallpaper and that she only came out during the daytime (Gilman 654). Therefore, the delusion of the heroine was brought on by severe depression and the inability of physicians to help the woman through appropriate treatment. The woman trapped in the yellow wallpaper is a metaphor for the protagonist’s entrapment. Due to the inability to correctly diagnose the conditions and treat them appropriately, instead of isolating the woman, the narrator was trapped by her depression, slowly leading to her insanity.
The story has a significant historical meaning since it illustrates the approaches doctors adopted toward female patients. Women were institutionalized between the years 1850 and 1900 for acting in ways that were disapproved of by male society (Pouba and Tianen 95). This supports the claim that women’s health was not prioritized or fully explored. Throughout the story, the readers can spot several symptoms of schizophrenia, which the main character possesses.
First, she complains about having a “queer feeling” about the house they purchased, which constitutes a sign of uneasiness and worries without any particular triggers being present (Gilman 647). That alone is not enough to worry or diagnose the disease, but it becomes more likely in combination with other factors. Other incidents included finding the otherwise drab yellow wallpaper unusually colorful and the decor’s elements to resemble people’s faces and eyes staring at her. Later, the woman claimed to have felt odd scents and even assigned a color to them—”It is like the color of the paper! A yellow smell” (Gilman 654). All of these symptoms clearly demonstrate hallucinations and delusions.
Finally, the woman illustrates a progressive attachment towards her husband, John, on whom, despite her continuous grievances, she seems more and more fixed. It borders on an obsession, which can be traced to schizophrenia as well as other obsessive-compulsive disorders. However, despite the symptoms and the woman not acting sanely, her husband did not seek other treatments.
Indeed, even when it came to their mental health, women of this era had very few rights and could not make decisions concerning their own well-being (Pouba and Tianen 95). When expressing emotions that were not favored, one would be called “a hysterical woman” (Silverio 60). Therefore, there were plenty of symptoms that could indicate the presence of a mental health issue. Yet, they were ignored, which illustrates the power of women in terms of their bodily autonomy and possible treatments.
Conclusion
Hence, the story of Gilman highlights how women’s mental health issues were not given priority since doctors thought they were peculiarities of the female anatomy, and they did not receive adequate care. The initial thesis of this paper was to illustrate the inefficiency of treatments for mental issues, the overwhelming oppression of women by society, and the unlikelihood of improvement under these conditions. The scenes presented in “The Yellow Wallpaper” are congruent with the descriptions provided by Pouba and Tianen and are typical of how mental health was handled in that day and age. The critical analysis shows that underplaying the severity of the condition and using unproven medicine can worsen the symptoms.
Works Cited
Gilman, Charlotte Perkins. “The Yellow Wallpaper.” National Institute of Health,
“Asylums in the United States of America.” Oshkosh Scholar, vol. 1, 2019, pp. 95-103. Web.
Pouba, Katherine, and Ashley Tianen. “Lunacy in the 19th Century: Women’s Admission to asylums in the United States of America.” Oshkosh Scholar, vol. 1, 2019, pp. 95-103. Web.
Silverio, Sergio A. “Women’s Mental Health as a Public Health Priority: A Call for Action.” Journal of Public Mental Health, vol. 20, no. 1, 2021, pp. 60-68. Web.