The Yellow Wallpaper: The Rest Cure

Words: 934
Pages: 4
Open Document
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
Show More

Related Documents: The Yellow Wallpaper: The Rest Cure

Rest Cure

The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman is a tale about madness and control. Our story starts with a woman who moves out into the country with her husband for a few months so she can recuperate from a nervous disorder caused by a recent child birth. Her prescribed treatment for her disorder is a rest cure, which forces the woman to stay inside all day and rest, unable to write, draw, or really do much of anything. The woman writes in her journal in secret and the story documents her slow…

Words 1002 - Pages 5

Character Analysis: The Yellow Wallpaper

According to the Merriam-Webster dictionary, fiction is defined as, ”Something invented by the imagination or feigned.” Although some, fictional stories such as “The Yellow Wallpaper” are tragically realistic for women of the time period. There is little difference between Charlotte Perkins Gilman and the main character of, “The Yellow Wallpaper”. Gilman suffered from a nervous condition, comparable to the one of the narrator. While the symptoms of the writer and the imaginy woman are similar, they are…

Words 1547 - Pages 7

How Do Jane's Struggle In The Yellow Wallpaper

"The Yellow Wallpaper" can be interpreted as a woman's struggle to free herself from the oppressive forces in her life where her madness is her freedom and the attempts to cure her are the oppressors' tools. Jane becomes unstable due to PPD, an ineffective cure as well as an oppressive husband. The story tells of a woman suffering postpartum depression. Her significant other, John, rents a house for her to attempt the rest-cure in and even threatens to send her to Silas Weir Mitchell if she doesn't…

Words 286 - Pages 2

Charlotte Perkins Wilman Research Paper

some works such as “The Yellow Wallpaper” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, this is not true because additional reading is necessary to understanding and receiving the true impact of the story. Rather than a writing based around the slow growth of insanity in a woman, as a superficial reader may grasp, it is a message of warning towards those using the rest cure. It is only through the additional reading of works such as Gilman’s other piece “Why I Wrote ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’” and S. Weir Mitchell’s…

Words 813 - Pages 4

Feminism In The Yellow Wallpaper

“The Yellow Wallpaper” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman confronts readers with the issues women of the 1800’s faced, such as, feminism and mental health that were not often talked about. “The Yellow Wallpaper” takes the reader on a journey of a nameless, mentally ill woman, who writes a series of journal entries when prescribed a “rest cure” by her doctor/husband. It is hard for today’s readers to understand what the narrator is going though, but for Gilman, this was reality. “The Yellow Wallpaper” stems…

Words 1060 - Pages 5

essay 1 english 102

the “The Yellow Wallpaper” written by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, the short story touches on important recurring themes that the author directly correlates around her era in the late 1800s. The story is about a woman who is suffering from depression and is taken to an ancestral home for the summer by her husband John, who is a doctor. Her husband and his family are all doctors, so they insist that the wife should keep away from all human/entertaining activities and should take as much rest as she can…

Words 1079 - Pages 5

Yellow Wallpaper Mental Health

No writing, no movement, nothing but their minds. In “The Yellow Wallpaper”, by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Jane, a woman admitted to a mental institution, struggles with her depression in a hostile environment during an unaccepting era. Throughout the story, Jane must resist her urge to leave the room she has been placed in for rest, and ignore the inner struggle that the wallpaper in the room causes for her. Eventually, the wallpaper becomes the only thing anchoring her to reality. Charlotte Perkins…

Words 976 - Pages 4

The Yellow Wallpaper

Analysis of The Yellow Wallpaper The Yellow Wallpaper is a collection of fictional journal entries written by a woman whose husband, also a physician, has confined her to the upstairs bedroom of a house, which he rents for the summer. As part of her “Rest Cure” treatment, she is forbidden from working and has to hide her journal from him so she can recuperate from what he calls a “slight hysterical tendency”, now known as depression, which was a common diagnosis to women in the late 19th century…

Words 1487 - Pages 6

Charlotte Perkins Gilman's Character Analysis: The Yellow Wallpaper

after having her daughter. She was ordered to rest by her husband and mother. “Her husband and mother were convinced that Gilman needed rest and willpower to overcome her depression; they persuaded her to go to Philadelphia for treatment by Dr. S. Weir Mitchell, the most famous American neurologist of the day,” (Gilman 1668). Mitchell was known for prescribing the rest cure for women that were suffering from depression. Dr. Mitchell had Gilman in rest for several months with limited intellectual activities…

Words 1137 - Pages 5

Analysis Of Charlotte Perkins Gilman's The Yellow Wallpaper

The Yellow Wallpaper, written by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, was published in 1892. The narrator of the short story is a woman that is being treated in a summer, colonial home for her “nervous depression” by her doctor husband. The narrator’s husband locks her away in the attic to be entirely sequestered from any artistic or intellectual activities that would impede her cure process. This short story was written to battle with the ways of treatment that these so-called doctors would use to treat depression…

Words 619 - Pages 3