Charlotte Perkins Gilman¿s The Yellow Wallpaper. An analysis

Seminar paper from the year 2008 in the subject American Studies - Literature, grade: 1,0, University of Vienna (Institut für Anglistik und Amerikanistik), course: Seminar des 2. Studienabschnitts, language: English, abstract: This paper seeks to shed light upon Charlotte Perkins Gilman¿s short story ¿The Yellow Wallpaper¿ (1892) ¿ a text that has become an American feminist classic and has been interpreted as a ¿transformed autobiography¿ (Shulman, xix), as a ¿journalistic/clinical account of a woman¿s gradual descent into madness¿ (Bak, 39), and in multiple ways as a ¿critique of gender relations¿ (Shulman, xix). It is a ¿bitter story¿, as Ann J. Lane describes it, ¿of a young woman driven to insanity by a loving husband-doctor, who, with the purest motives, imposed Mitchell¿s ¿rest cure¿¿ (Lane, vii). The narrator of the story is diagnosed as suffering from a ¿temporary nervous depression¿ (W, 4), which is today known as ¿postpartum depression¿, that is, a depression caused by profound hormonal changes after childbirth. Written some five years after the author herself, following the birth of her first child, became ¿a mental wreck¿ in need of a ¿rest cure¿, ¿The Yellow Wallpaper¿ is a fictionalized account of Gilman¿s own subjection to the rest cure of Silas Weir Mitchell, whose mode of treatment so notoriously typified conventional late Victorian doctoring of women .