"The Yellow Wallpaper" by Charlotte Gilman

I really identified with Charlotte Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper.” Gilman’s story deals with apart of mental illness that most people do not recognize immediately, namely that some forms of psychosis are triggered by something else. In Gilman’s and the narrator’s cases the trigger is post-partum depression. In my case, it was a reaction to a fairly common medication. Just like the protagonist in Gilman’s story, it took weeks before the severity of the mental illness was apparent to my family. Of course today unlike when the story was written, medications are available to help the patient but recovery still takes time.

The narrator’s diary in Gilman’s story shows how she slowly slips further into the mental illness and how ineffective her physician husband’s prescribed rest cure is. The narrator’s focus on the yellow wallpaper makes sense to me as her room had nothing else interesting for her mind to focus on. When your brain is becoming chemically imbalanced, you seem to know something is wrong but you are not sure what is causing the problem. Then you begin to focus on things in the environment that could be the cause of these strange thoughts. From the beginning of the story, the narrator is questioning reality. In the opening sentences she states, “Still I will proudly declare that there is something queer about it”(Gilman, line 5), referring to the opportunity to rent such a nice home for the summer.

The illogical thinking that is characteristic of psychosis is in evidence throughout the diary. For example, the narrator describes her trying to spin around fast enough to see if the creeping woman from the wallpaper is visible outside from all the windows at once (line 205). The narrator also illogically attributes living qualities to the wallpaper that finally produces a woman who comes from behind the paper, first just at night and then both during the day and night. The final illogical humanization of the paper is the woman, who has been trapped behind the paper, is so identified with the narrator that they have changed places completely. The narrator says, ‘“I’ve got out at last,’’ said I, ‘’in spite of you and Jane. And I pulled off most of the paper so you can’t put me back!”’(line 266). All these illogical thoughts seem very real to the narrator and that is what makes it so difficult for a cure to come from the individual alone. So rest or exercise or strong will does not cure psychosis.