The Yellow Wallpaper

The Yellow Wallpaper is a short story written by Charlotte Gilman in 1892 that was not per se based on her own battle with severe depression, incorporated elements of her past circumstances into her story. Even though this short story would best incorporate elements of psychological disorders from Chapter 16 in our textbook, I will use it to link principles found in Chapter 6 that it illustrates and principles in Chapter 17 that are neglected.

The narrator, unnamed, in The Yellow Wallpaper, is an upper-class, newly married woman who has recently had a child. She is undergoing treatment for her “nervous depression”, which has been diagnosed by her husband that is a physician. Her husband believes that the “rest cure” is best for his wife, so he takes her out to a house in the country that they will stay in together. He continues to go to work, but she is to stay at the house and not stress herself by doing any sort of chore, writing, or anything else active. 

The forced inactivity proves to be ineffective, and gradually seems to be detrimental to her. She decides to keep a journal, though she is prohibited from doing so, and the beginning of her descent into madness can be traced by the subtleties in her journal. The way she describes the wallpaper in her room and the house as a whole- unpleasant, bars in the windows, revolting- gradually go from neutral to implied discomfort/unpleasantness, to irrational fear and hatred of her surroundings. Provided with no other stimulus besides her secret diary she eventually fixates and becomes obsessed with the yellow wallpaper and feverishly strives to “figure it out”. Whether it be because of her natural perceptual set, her mental illness, or a combination of the two, she eventually perceives a woman to be “trapped behind bars in the wallpaper”. From a logical standpoint, her perception was probably a result of the grouping of the complex patterns in the wallpaper into figure-ground sets, combined with the lack of external stimulation/mental illness that caused her to see the women in the wallpaper. 

She notices gouges in the wood of the bedposts and tears/smudges along the wallpaper and wonders if her room had previously been a kid’s room, as it would explain the damages. She dreams of the woman behind the wallpaper tearing at the walls and shaking the bars (patterns). Once she “figures out” the wallpaper, she focuses her efforts on freeing that woman creeping along behind the wallpaper. Paradoxically, the further she descends into her illness, the greater insight she acquires into her situation. The reader realizes the tears and gouges were caused by the narrator. The narrator realizes that it is she who is trapped in the wallpaper, along with the other ladies. Her husband comes up to check on her to find the door locked. They have an exchange, whereupon he results to breaking to door down. He sees how the wallpaper has been torn and the wood gouged and his wife- completely consumed by her madness, crawling around against the wall smudging it with her shoulder that fits in a perfect little groove. Her husband faints in the doorway and she has to “creep over him every time!”

Instead of taking an active approach to his wife’s depression, John (the narrator’s husband) decides the “rest cure”, which is forced inactivity. He believes that the absence of excess stimulation will calm her brain, which had been processing too many things and she had stressed herself into depression. He thought that the relaxation would allow her to build her resistance block anxiety-laden material. Instead of referring her to another doctor or engaging her in psychotherapy, he actively did nothing. I believe she would have benefitted the most from psychoanalysis, as it would have helped both of them to figure out the source and the depth of her depression, which would point them in the right direction and/or help them considerably in treating it. Client-centered therapy, such as active listening would have also benefitted her, but John chose to ignore her instead.