The Yellow Wallpaper A Study of Insanity
For the women in the twentieth century today, who have more freedom than before and have not experienced the depressive life that Gilman lived from1860 to 1935, it is difficult to understand Gilman's situation and understand the significance of "The Yellow Wallpaper". Gilman's original purpose of writing the story was to have gained personal satisfaction if Dr. S. Weir Mitchell might change his treatment after reading the story. However, as Ann L. Jane suggests, "The Yellow Wallpaper" is "the best crafted of her fiction: a genuine literary piece...the most directly, obviously, self-consciously autobiographical of all her stories" (Introduction xvi). More importantly, Gilman says in her article in The Forerunner, "It was not intended to drive people crazy, but to save people from being driven crazy, and it worked" (20). Therefore, "The Yellow Wallpaper" is a revelation of Charlotte Perkins Gilman's own emotions. When the story first came out in 1892 the critics considered "The Yellow Wallpaper" as a portrayal of female insanity rather than a story that reveals an aspect of society. In The Transcript, a physician from Boston wrote, "Such a story ought not to be written...it was enough to drive anyone mad to read it" (Gilman
In her diary she wrote, "I went home, followed those directions rigidly for a month and came perilously near to losing my mind" (Lane, To Herland 121). The attempts to discover was hard for her "(it) must have haunted Gilman all her life because it answered the question: what if she had not fled her husband and renounced the most advance psychiatric advice of her time?" (Lane, Introduction xviii). Gilman expressed her emotional and psychological feelings of rejection from society for thinking freely in "The Yellow Wallpaper," which is a reaction to the fact that it was against the grain of society for women to pursue intellectual freedom or a career in the late1800's. This implies that she wrote this story to sort through her emotions and fears in her own life. She attempted to express the tensions she felt her work, her husband, and her child in her writing. Bibliography Berkin, Ruth Carol. He told Gilman that "she was suffering from neurasthenia, or exhaustion of the nerves" the diagnosis required his renowned "rest cure" (Lane, To Herland 115). In her "Why I wrote 'The Yellow Wallpaper'?" in The Forerunner, Gilman portrays the "years I suffered from a severe and continuous nervous breakdown" and goes on to talk about the doctor who treated her and how in reaction to treatment had "sent a copy to the physician who so nearly drove me mad" (Gilman 19, 20).
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