The Yellow Wall Paper

According to Charlotte Perkins Stetson’s The Yellow Wall-Paper, it is an experience from a woman that suffer from depression or hysteria after the birth of her child. Since the woman’s husband locks her up in a room that has windows with bars and surrounded by yellow wallpaper, she started to believe that a woman is living under the wall. There are a lot of metaphors inside the writing, like the color “yellow” symbols life and energy but ironically it reflected the desire of freedom from the woman. As she confessed, “It is dull enough to confuse the eye in following, pronounced enough to constantly irritate and provoke study, and when you follow the lame uncertain curves for a little distance they suddenly commit suicide…”(Stetson, 1892, p.648). Mentally, It is the projection of the woman’s unconsciousness, but scientifically we could also seem like the cause of visual fatigue. Some people believe that keep writing will gradually evoke your unconscious mind. However, it seems that the environment and the way that the woman keeps writing her journal only emphasize her mental illness. When the illness becomes more severe, she begins to have illusions and convincing herself that everyone sees the woman that lives under the wall, “I’ve caught him several times looking at the paper!”(Stetson, 1892, p.653) The projection of her unconsciousness is confirmed by her own paranoid and keep driving herself into the swamp. The other thing about this article is the way of narrating the situation. The woman frequently using “I” with an active voice in her journal, which also symbols the idea of her longing for power and obtains her freedom from the world.

The woman’s husband, John, is a doctor himself is a metaphor of the society’s mistreatment in mental illness and women’s right. Women lived under gender rules, having unequal status in marriage and less finical independence back in the history. Moreover, based on the past, mental illness was dismissed by authority and science, according to Foucault (1961) “These madmen were housed and provided for in the city budget, and yet they were not given treatment; they were simply thrown into prison.”(p.7) Which is similar to the situation of the woman in The Yellow Wall-Paper. The way people treated mental illness back then not only because they refused to find out the reason but also a common disease in humans. Human tends to crowd out the abnormality, and believe in what the majority think. Everyone has a particular or potential mental illness; the only difference is the percentage of it. In another perspective, the husband in The Yellow Wall-Paper is an oppressive and a controller due to his extreme treatment to his wife even the way that doing that is out of love. Mental illness couldn’t be a unilateral problem; it is the society and the environment that we live in shape the psychological mind of human beings. Although our medical condition and knowledge have improved and people no longer get mistreated, but everyone still has the tendency to get a metal break down and still suffered in mental illness.

Reference:

Foucault, M. (2001). Madness and civilization. New York: London.

Gilman, C. P., & Knight, D. D. (1994). "The yellow wall-paper" and selected stories of Charlotte Perkins Gilman. Newark: University of Delaware Press.