Written as a critique of the conventional medical
treatment prescribed by Dr. S. Weir Mitchell for women of the Victorian Age who suffered
from a condition known as "neurathenia," Charlotte Perkins Gilman's "The Yellow
Wallpaper" portrays the subjugation of married women under a patriarchal medical
profession. Gilman's narrator, a young mother who suffers from what today is know as
postpartum depression, a condition which prevents her from caring adequately for her
baby, is deprived of all mental, physical, and social activities. Unfortunately, the
patriarchal husband John as well as Dr. Mitchell refuse to acknowledge the narrator's
desires and needs, feeling instead that they are the proper judges of her
condition.
The narrative of Gilman's story expresses a
concern with the repressed role of women as wives and mothers in the patriarchal
nineteenth century. With the femme covert laws of the Victorian
Age, women had many domestic limitations placed upon them and were permitted little or
no creative self-expression. This situation itself was often cause for repression and
its resulting mental illness in many a wife and mother. In "The Yellow Wallpaper," the
hideous wallpaper itself becomes symbolic of this feminine oppression. It contradicts
symmetry and color--the aesthetics that the narrator loves. Without being able to walk
in the garden or draw or write, locked in the room with the detestable paper that her
husband refuses to change, the narrator becomes increasing ill, perceiving the "hideous
paper" as an antagonist to her aesthetic desires and needs. Finally, in a desperate
effort of the mind to free itself from its repression and agonies, Gilman's narrator
attempts to free the "woman" who is behind the narrator--her symbolic self. She has
seen other women behind the paper and asks, "I wonder if they all come out of that
wallpaper as I did?" Yet repressed, however, she adds, "I suppose I shal have to get
back behind the pattern when it comes night, and that is hard!"
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