e sensory outlet left her—studying the yellow wallpaper. In the yellow wallpaper we see symbolized numerous things, but the most significant one is that the woman trapped within it represents the way the female narrator feels. Those around here, particularly her husband/physicians, wish the narrator would do nothing but rest. They fail to realize that by removing her active interest in anything but sleep and rest they are further deteriorating her condition because it drives her more insane to have nothing to “experience”, “He loves me very dearly, and hates to have me sick. I tried to have a real earnest reasonable talk with him the other day, and tell him how I wish he would let me go and make a visit to Cousin Henry and Julia. But he said I wasn’t able to go, nor able to stand it after I got there; and I did not make out a very good case for myself, for I was crying before I had finished” (Gilman 10). Thus, the narrator experiences the one thing left open to her senses and analytical interaction, the yellow wallpaper.
In John Dewey’s philosophy of experience and nature, we see he is opposed to this rigid “resting” of the mind and the senses. He argued that the problem with education was its authoritative and dogmatic nature, absent of the learning process by interacting and experience. Learning by doing was natural to animals, and Dewey argues that to do otherwise is one way to lose mental health and even the capacity to learn itself. Dewey does not believe that learning is some kind of transcendent process, but an ongoing one that arises from interaction with the self and the outsi
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