The Yellow Wallpaper

I started reading "The Yellow Wallpaper" with mixed emotions after I had read Charlotte Perkins Gilman's little biography. In the biography it said, "Like most of Gilman's work, it [the story] makes a point - in this case, about the dangers of women's utter dependence on a male interpretation of their needs." (366) After I read the story, that quote didn't sit too well with me, because in the case of the narrator of The Yellow Wallpaper, the "male interpretation" (366) was her physician who was also her husband (367) and her brother, who was also a physician. (367) It seems too broad to me to blame her troubles on the males - her husband and brother. Why was she choosing to have "utter dependence on a male interpretation of her needs?" Why not talk to a female and see what she had to say? I guess this story kind of frusterated me because this lady seems helpless, and gullible. Why couldn't she just have a mind of her own and, if it is so dangerous to be dependant on a male, not be dependent on the males? I realize independance was discouraged and frowned upon back then (this was written in 1892), but reading about the helplessness of this woman was frusterating and sad.

Also, her husband John frusterated me. "John is practical to the extreme. He has no patience with faith, an intense horror of supersitition, and he scoffs openly at any talk of things not to be felt and seen and put down in figures." (367) To me John seems very narrow-minded. If you look into the world, there are things you can't see (especially with the naked eye) but know are there. It also frusterated and apalled me that John laughed at his wife. "John laughs at me, of course, but one expects that in marriage." (366) The way I read this, John was not laughing with his wife, no, he was laughing at her. I don't think any husband should laugh at his wife; its rude and disrespectful. I think this might give us readers an idea of how John thought about his wife, and therefore treated her.

"John says if I don't pick up faster he shall send me to Weir Mitchell in the fall. But I don't want to go there at all." (370, 371). That sounded like a threat to me. You would think a physician would not threaten his patient, but a husband threatening his wife? It doesn't sit well with me.

On a lighter note, I thought I noticed some irony in this story. "This bed will not move! I tried to lift and push it until I was lame, and then I got so angry I bit off a little piece at one corner - but it hurt my teeth." (377) Then one little paragraph later, she says, "I am getting angry enough to do something desperate." (377). Biting off the corner of the bed sounds like something desprate!

All in all, I didn't really like this story. The point of the story, to me, was postpartum depression is a very real, serious, dibilating mental issue and needs to have proper medical treatment, not that it is dangerous to be utterly dependant on men. (366)

It is dangerous to be utterly dependant on anyone.