For my Literature class, we were assigned to read “The Yellow Wall-Paper” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman. At first, I really didn’t think I would like the story but I was quite surprised.
The story is about a woman who has a creative mind but to her husband and brother she has a nervous disorder and needs a lifestyle of rest to “cure” her. I was quite appalled to learn that the rest cure was something that is real and the story was based upon Gilman’s experience with her ex husband who came up with the rest cure. I can’t imagine day in and day out of rest. The character wasn’t allowed any outside contact other than with her husband or the maid/nurse which was her sister-in-law. She couldn’t even hold or interact with her child which to me is extremely harsh. I can’t even imagine being a mother and being kept from my child. Throughout the story, the wall paper in the room the narrator was kept in started being almost like prison bars. She begins imagining a lady behind the wall paper trying to escape. In my opinion, I think she was starting to go crazy by her captivity. Can you really blame her? In the end, she doesn’t recognize anyone and she does have a mental break which is to be blamed upon her husband. You get the feeling he was only trying to help and do what he thought was right but shouldn’t he have taken her opinion into consideration? If you’ve never read the story, I strongly recommend it. A copy can be found online here.
The story really got me to thinking how thankful I should be that I am a woman and alive in this time period instead of back then. The women of yesteryear really paved the way for women of today and how they would be so proud to know the rights we have as women today. I just feel sorry for the narrator in the story because she was a creative soul and the creativity was put down by her husband who feared her creativity. In a way, maybe he was scared of her because she was so intelligent and able to think outside of the box which was something that was rare back then or if someone did possess that skill they were thought to be crazy. It’s really scary to know we are encouraged to think outside of the box now but if we did a hundred years ago we’d be locked up in some asylum somewhere. It’s amazing how times have changed.
