The Yellow Wallpaper: The Rest Cure

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In The Yellow Wallpaper, the medical procedure used is called The Rest Cure. According to (Science Museum), Silas Weir Mitchell developed the rest cure in the late 1800s for the treatment of hysteria, neurasthenia and other nervous illnesses. This treatment kept patients in isolation, away from friends and family for 6-8 weeks. The writer does not agree with this procedure because she has experienced it firsthand. Gilman suffered from a severe and continuous nervous breakdown tending to melancholia-and beyond (Literature Network). She experienced a severe depression and underwent a series of unusual treatments for it (Biography). For a woman, the Rest Cure involves loneliness, which can make a person go insane. Although many women complained …show more content…
The room was big and airy with warn out yellow wall paper. She is ordered to rest and spend as much time in the room as possible. Although she does not like the situation, her husband is a doctor, he wins all their arguments. This is a woman who has a mind that likes to wander. She is an artist and a writer. Over time she becomes obsessed with the wallpaper, seeing things in the wall that no one else can see. She begins fanatically tracing the pattern of the wallpaper and soon becomes convinced that there is a woman trapped within the paper. Shortly before the narrator is ready to leave the house, she decides that she must free the trapped woman by stripping the wallpaper off. When her husband comes into the room, the narrator decides that she is now free. Upon seeing his wife creeping around the room peeling the paper off the walls, John faints. The narrator continues creeping around the room. The story is based on the yellow wallpaper as it is in the title. The writer starts the story like it is going to be a horror involving a large secluded summer home. She has a husband that makes all decisions for her, telling here when she is sick and what her sickness is. The conflict of the story is the narrator wants to express her feelings and write. But she is forbidden from doing any of these things. In the story she quotes “he hates to have me write a word”. John believes any activity can make …show more content…
She is convinced that she has achieved liberation at last, but is she really liberated? We realize that the woman in the wallpaper is actually the narrator herself. "I've got out at last," said I, "in spite of you and Jane. And I've pulled off most of the paper, so you can't put me back!" The tearing of the wallpaper symbolizes freedom. She believes the wallpaper has her trapped, and tearing it all down frees her from her prison. When John faints, and she continues to climb over him. She realizes that the narrator was right in her fears of confinement and has paid with her
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