Charlotte Perkins Gilman's The Yellow Wallpaper. An analysis

Seminar paper from the year 2008 in the subject American Studies - Literature grade: 10 University of Vienna (Institut für Anglistik und Amerikanistik) course: Seminar des 2. Studienabschnitts language: English abstract: This paper seeks to shed light upon Charlotte Perkins Gilman's short story The Yellow Wallpaper (1892) - a text that has become an American feminist classic and has been interpreted as a 'transformed autobiography' (Shulman xix) as a 'journalistic/clinical account of a woman's gradual descent into madness' (Bak 39) and in multiple ways as a 'critique of gender relations' (Shulman xix). It is a 'bitter story' as Ann J. Lane describes it 'of a young woman driven to insanity by a loving husband-doctor who with the purest motives imposed Mitchell's rest cure' (Lane vii). The narrator of the story is diagnosed as suffering from a 'temporary nervous depression' (W 4) which is today known as 'postpartum depression' that is a depression caused by profound hormonal changes after childbirth. Written some five years after the author herself following the birth of her first child became 'a mental wreck' in need of a 'rest cure' The Yellow Wallpaper is a fictionalized account of Gilman's own subjection to the rest cure of Silas Weir Mitchell whose mode of treatment so notoriously typified conventional late Victorian doctoring of women .