Yellow Wallpaper

Article historicizing “The Yellow Wallpaper”

The article in “Literature and its Times” examines the story “The Yellow Wallpaper” written by Charlotte Perkins Gilman with the historical settings and events at the time that it was written. It mainly discusses about women’s social status and roles at the Victorian Age. And, it also contains the golden age of hysteria and the rest cure that failed to define female mental illness. In regards to those, it deals what cultural restrictions forced to women and how Gilman tried to express and incorporate its destructive effects into her story. Women’s roles in the past were very limited and restricted. Women were inferior to men in any field and basically remained within house. Despite the academic education was available, it was just bounded to domestic sphere. These social and cultural oppressions evoke women to stand up for gaining their rights. In the late Victorian Age, the desire started getting intense so the women’s rights movement emerged. In the article, it says the first women’s rights convention was begun in 1848 and women achieved some rights by 1892. Gilman took a part of the movements and put her efforts toward sex education, which landed in the social purity movements. The article show a controversy about the range of women’s roles which became the “Women’s Question.” She proclaims her feministic views that women should have choices and opportunities for professions and others. And, the refusal of the expansion of women’s roles will progress the severe depression. Gilman pointed out that the consequences occurred from unilateral oppression ruins a woman’s mental health. She proved that the “rest cure” failed to heal the depression she had been suffered. This article demonstrates how Gilman used her story to convince the risk of the medical treatment created by one-sided viewpoints. She criticizes Mitchell’s method of the “rest cure” that it does not help curing the depression. According to her...