The Postpartum Depression in The Yellow Wallpaper

The Yellow Wallpaper: A Story of Madness and Oppression

The Yellow Wallpaper is a literary piece that was written by Charlotte Perkins Gilman. Gilman presents a character who succumbs to depression after childbirth and is further locked up in a dark room away from her daughter, and the outside society which drives the narrator into madness. After giving birth, the narrator suffers from a mental illness called postpartum depression, but due to the mental oppression she is subjected to by her husband by isolating her from the society, her situation gets worse and she descends to madness. The setting the narrator is put in by her domineering husband whereby she is not able to see her child, and is kept away from everyone, and the horrid wallpaper in the room drives her into complete madness. The narrator suffered from a temporary mental illness; however, the fact that she was left in solitude,and isolated from the society drove her insane.<\/p>

The Isolation and Madness of the Narrator

\u00a0\u00a0 As the story begins, we are introduced to a woman narrator with a mental illness and is confined in a colonial mansion away from everyone by her husband. She stays in a dark room upstairs in the old mansion alone, and she is obsessed with the callous wallpaper in the room because that is the only thing she could see as a companion. According to Gilman, \u201cThe color is repellent, almost revolting, a smoldering yellow, strangely faded by the slow-truing sunlight,\u201d and this affected the narrator’s mental health since the wallpaper consumed the narrator\u2019s emotions and thoughts and this had a negative effect on her mental status (Gilman 271). Her obsession with the wallpaper negatively affects her emotionally and physically which further damaged her mental condition.

The narrator\u2019s husband John is a physician who understood the mental health of her wife after giving birth. In fact, according to the narrator, he even \u00a0refused to acknowledge that she was mentally unstable and she needed proper treatment and love from the people she stays with including himself to get better. This is evident when the narrator says, \u201cYou see, he does not believe I am sick, If a physician of high standing and one\u2019s own husband assures friends and relatives that there is really nothing the matter with one. What is one to do?\u201d (Gilman 105). Unfortunately, despite being a physician, he locks her all alone in a dark room in the name of giving her a rest and this isolation made her mental state worse (Ghandeharion and Milad 115). The narrator was already mentally ill, all she needed was proper care and medication but this did not happen because she was left in solitude and everything in the room consumed her thoughts as she because disassociated with the real world thus descending into madness.

The Deteriorating Mental State

Being confined in a room with no company, no physical activity, and no mental stimulation, the solitude the narrator felt drove her into madness. There is no way the mental state of the narrator could have improved with the unfavorable conditions her husband had subjected her to in the darkroom with ugly wallpapers in an isolated mansion. John thought by locking her away from her child and the people in the society, the wife could get well and heal from the postpartum depression. However, this further harmed her mental state because she did not receive the right treatment for her mental health condition (Knellwolf 133). The confinement in a room with an ugly wallpaper made her sickness worse because the depression worsened and turned into a serious mental illness. If only the narrator was given the right medication and allowed to stay with people she loves around her, her mental state could have improved and not deteriorated as we see in the story.

The Oppression of Women in Society

\u00a0In this story, it is evident that mental illness is a serious condition that needs proper and urgent treatment. Gilman\u2019s narrator was suffering from a mental illness that could have been treated and the narrator goes back to her child and family. However, she did not receive the right treatment since she was locked up away from everyone and the isolation made her insane (Schroder 22). The narrator suffered mental oppression from a physician husband who could have done much to make her unstable mental status stable. According to Berman, the narrator needed urgent medical attention, but since she was lived in a patriarchal society, where women were supposed to be submissive to their husbands, her mental illness got worse because of her submission to the domineering man in her life (54). The society was full of female subjugation, she had no say about her health condition and even her husband\u2019s decisions in a male-controlled society, and this pushed her into further depression and later on madness.

The Role of Mental Illness in the Story

\u00a0 Mental illness is an important theme in The Yellow Wallpaper because Gilman uses it to build the plot of the story. The narrator was a woman living in a male-controlled society and despite needing treatment for her deteriorating mental state; she never got treatment since she had no say as a woman in the nineteenth-century society (Quawas 38). The narrator was trapped by the husband because as a man, he made all the decisions and she was to submit without any questions. This is evident when she mentions that \u201cIt is so hard to talk to John about my case because he is so wise,\u201d this means that the narrator believed her husband was right and all she was to do was to be a submissive wife (Gilman 666). She was forced to remain locked up is a solitary room away from the real world and the detention drove her into real\/complete madness. Her mental status deteriorated day by day as she got obsessed with the ugly wallpaper and in the end, she became mad. Initially, she was diagnosed with a temporary mental illness after childbirth, but later on, she is driven into serious madness due to lack of proper treatment options.

In Conclusion

\u00a0\u00a0 In conclusion, Charlotte Gilman\u2019s The Yellow Wallpaper is a story about a character who was confined in solitude by her husband and this led to her becoming insane. The narrator suffered from postpartum depression after giving birth and this made her mental state unstable. However, instead of her husband finding her better treatment, he locked her up in a dark room in an old mansion with a scary wallpaper. As a result, the setting she was forced to stay deteriorated her mental state and drove her into madness. The narrator was prevented from seeing her child and even communicating to the outside world let alone writing something she wished to do. This mental and physical oppression made her mental state worse and the narrator descended into madness.

Works Cited

Berman, Jeffrey. “The Unrestful Cure: Charlotte Perkins Gilman and The Yellow            Wallpaper.”The Talking Cure: Literary Representations of Psychoanalysis (1985): 33      59.

Ghandeharion  Azra, and Milad Mazari. “Women Entrapment and Flight in Gilman’s ”The    Yellow Wallpaper”.“29, (2016):113-129.

Gilman, Charlotte Perkins. ”Why I Wrote The Yellow Wallpaper.“The Forerunner 4 (1913): 271.

Gilman, Charlotte Perkins. The Yellow Wallpaper. Penguin UK, 2015. Print.

Knellwolf, Christa. ”Madness and Interpretation in The Yellow Wallpaper.“Modernity, Modernism, Postmodernism 121 (2000): 133.

Quawas, Rula. ”A New Woman’s Journey into Insanity: Descent and Return in The Yellow Wallpaper.“Journal of the Australasian Universities Language and Literature            Association2006.105 (2006): 35-53.

Schroder, Marie. ”Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s ”The Yellow Wall-Paper” from a Feminist          Perspective. A Woman’s Place in a Patriarchal World.“(2015):1-34. Print.