1. The Yellow Wallpaper By: Charlotte Perkins Gilman Brad Schmidt Jared Jamie

2. Gilman suffered from neurasthenia after she had her daughter. This disease is characterized by depression and fatigue but was not linked at the time to the depression some women experience after having a baby or postpartum depression. Her “unsuccessful prescription” (gradesaver.com) from Silas Weir Mitchell lead her to write “The Yellow Wallpaper”. Overview of Yellow Wallpaper and about the Author

3. After Gilman had written “The Yellow Wallpaper” she decided to write an explanation of her purpose or so-what behind the story. She says that she based it on her own personal experiences through this disease and “it was not intended to drive people crazy, but to save people from being driven crazy, and it worked.” (Gilman, “Why I wrote Yellow Wallpaper”)

4. Here is a quote from that passage that helps explains why Gilman had to publish another article in order to explain why she wrote “The Yellow Wallpaper”. “[A] Boston physician made protest in The Transcript. Such a story ought not to be written, he said; it was enough to drive anyone mad to read it. Another physician, in Kansas I think, wrote to say that it was the best description of incipient insanity he had ever seen, and--begging my pardon--had I been there?” (Gilman, “Why I wrote Yellow Wallpaper”)

5. This quote shows how doctors and physicians during the 19 th and 20 th centuries thought that they knew what diseases or illnesses women were contracting and how to treat them. They also did not take the opinions of the women, even about their own health very seriously. The female oppression in medicine is obvious in The Yellow Wallpaper when ever the narrator would try to talk to her husband about how she felt or what she thought she should do and these comments were brushed aside as if they were not worth anything.

6. Also Gilman expresses her feelings about how the “rest cure” that she had been prescribed by “the esteemed physician Silas Weir Mitchell” (gradesaver.com) It did not help her but had a reverse effect and saved herself by “using the remnants of intelligence that remained, and helped by a wise friend, [she] cast the noted specialist's advice to the winds and went to work again--work, the normal life of every human being”. (Gilman, “Why I wrote Yellow Wallpaper”)

7. Gilman was able to alter medical practices with The Yellow Wallpaper and says that she has “saved one woman from a similar fate--so terrifying her family that they let her out into normal activity and she recovered.” (Gilman, “Why I wrote Yellow Wallpaper”) She was also using it to represent the oppression of women in a masculine society. Also the doctor that had applying the “rest cure” to her altered his treatment for neurasthenia or postpartum depression. Gilman was later diagnosed with incurable breast cancer and she killed herself with an overdose of chloroform rather then letting others be in charge of her life.

8. “The Yellow Wallpaper” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman is about a women suffering from neurasthenia or postpartum depression. She waits to work and still be productive but a physician along with he husband and brother give her the “rest cure” prescription. This is what causes her depression to escalade because she is unable to feel productive in society but becomes a recluse. The narrator is in prison. Her room has bars on the windows and her life is controlled by a detailed schedule. In the end she becomes the woman in the wall that she sees throughout the story and at this point is belong all medical help.