Charlotte Perkins Gilman: “The Yellow Wallpaper”

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“The Yellow Wallpaper” is Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s harrowing 1892 tale about a new mother’s descent into postpartum depression and ultimately psychosis.

The unnamed narrator loves to write and naturally thinks of turning to this creative outlet in the days after she gives birth. But her physician husband prescribes the “rest cure,” a mode of treatment popularized in the late nineteenth century by S. Weir Mitchell.

According to the rest cure, women suffering from “neurasthenia” were confined to their bedrooms and expressly denied any form of mental activity, including writing. This was believed to settle the nerves, but in many cases the treatment worsened the women’s symptoms.

In her 1913 essay, “Why I Wrote The Yellow Wallpaper,” Gilman admits that the story of the narrator’s breakdown was based in part on her own struggles with postpartum depression and the “noted specialist’s” prescription of the rest cure. The noted specialist, unnamed by Gilman in the essay, was indeed S. Weir Mitchell. She writes:

For many years I suffered from a severe and continuous nervous breakdown tending to melancholia – and beyond. During about the third year of this trouble I went, in devout faith and some faint stir of hope, to a noted specialist in nervous diseases, the best known in the country. This wise man put me to bed and applied the rest cure, to which a still-good physique responded so promptly that he concluded there was nothing much the matter with me, and sent me home with solemn advice to “live as domestic a life as far as possible,” to “have but two hours’ intellectual life a day,” and “never to touch pen, brush, or pencil again” as long as I lived.

I went home and obeyed those directions for some three months, and came so near the borderline of utter mental ruin that I could see over.

Then, using the remnants of intelligence that remained, and helped by a wise friend, I cast the noted specialist’s advice to the winds and went to work again–work, the normal life of every human being; work, in which is joy and growth and service, without which one is a pauper and a parasite–ultimately recovering some measure of power.

Being naturally moved to rejoicing by this narrow escape, I wrote The Yellow Wallpaper. . . .

You can read “The Yellow Wallpaper” online. If you become intrigued by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, a feminist thinker far ahead of her time, you might want to check out the Charlotte Perkins Gilman website as well a paperback edition of The Yellow Wallpaper and Other Writings. It includes the famous short story as well as Gilman’s utopian novel Her-Land about a peaceful, all-female community and excerpts from her landmark nonfiction work, Women and Economics.

Join me this week on Pinterest as I pin images and resources related to Charlotte Perkins Gilman. Take a look around at all my boards – or go straight to “My Favorite Short Stories” board for Charlotte Perkins Gilman treats.

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