The Yellow Wallpaper - Charlotte Perkins Gilman

Upon completing Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper”, I was immediately convinced that the protagonist was afflicted with post partum depression. Lines such as “Yet I cannot be with him, it makes me so nervous” (Gilman 489) and “I never thought of it before, but it is lucky that John kept me here after all; I can stand it so much easier than a baby, you see” (Gilman 492) clearly points to a woman who can not handle the pressures of being a mother. Gilman wrote this story in the latter part of the 1800’s, a time when post partum depression was most likely not a widely recognized problem. As a result of the time, the protagonist was treated like a mentally ill patient and not capable of caring for herself. Her husband John forced her into a room that “was nursery first, and then playroom and gymnasium, I should judge, for the windows are barred for little children” (Gilman 488), thus treating her like a child that could not be trusted alone. Cleary, the isolation eats away at the protagonist’s mental state, making her delusional and insistent that the room’s yellow wallpaper was almost like a living entity that would change shape, size and patterns. However, I believe that the wallpaper is really the protagonist’s child as she personifies the wallpaper by insisting that “she crawls around fast” (Gilman 495) and “takes hold of the bars and shakes them hard (Gilman 495). By the end of the story, it is clear that the protagonist has done something awful to her child and not the wallpaper. John’s fainting was most likely a result of discovering his wife’s shocking actions against his child and realizing that his wife had a serious problem that could not be cured by keeping her shut away in a room.