The Yellow Wallpaper

In her own life, Charlotte Perkins Gilman underwent the famous ôrest cureö prescribed by physicians in her era. A form of quackery, the rest cure severely restricted an individuals activities and even their thoughts. Gilman viewed this ôcureö as confining and as destructive to women as being continually subjected to male-dominance in a patriarchal society. As Gilman (1) says of the famous rest cure, ôIt was not intended to drive people crazy, but to save people from being driven crazy.ö In ôThe Yellow Wallpaper,ö we see Gilman compares being driven crazy by the confining nature of the ôrest cureö in a similar manner to the potentially destructive and just as confining nature of male-dominance toward women.

The female narrator of ôThe Yellow Wallpaperö has been prescribed rest, a cure that keeps her confined to her bed in a state

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n on the wallpaper is one that implies something negative or ôinterminable,ö like she finds her condition in a patriarchal existence. The narrator is refused any intellectual thought or exercise of mind, so she attaches herself to the wallpaper as a matter of forging an identity that she can control and define. As she tells us, ôBut I am here, and no person touches this paper but Meùnot aliveö (Gilman 17)! Ultimately, the impact of the ôrest cureö is to drive the narrator insane. No longer able to bear the madness of isolation and complete mental and physical inactivity, the narrator begins to rip down the wallpaper. She views the ripping down of the wallpaper as some small victory over the male forces that hold her captive. Once she rips down the wallpaper she feels that she has achieved a sense of identity and expression that cannot be undermined by her husband or anyone else around her. As she exclaims, ôIÆve got out at last. In spit of you and Jane. And IÆve pulled off most of the paper, so you canÆt put me backö (Gilman 19)! During her own experience with the ôrest cure,ö Gilman maintains that she nearly went insane. Told never to even write again, Gilman nearly went crazy from the restricting confines of the res
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Approximate Word count = 1532
Approximate Pages = 6 (250 words per page)

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