The Yellow Wallpaper Cure Essay

The Cure
In “The Yellow Wallpaper” a woman is trapped in a colonial mansion where she cannot do anything on her own. She is forced to sit and do nothing. She is not allowed to interact with the outside world or even write, because it is considered to be too much for her and the cause of her nervousness. As this so called resting treatment continues she slowly begins to lose her mind. The author of “The Yellow Wallpaper”, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, uses rhetoric throughout her story. However, she really focuses on symbolism. For instance the wallpaper itself is the main symbol throughout the story. The wallpaper starts out so sad and unappealing in the beginning of the story, it was one of those “sprawling flamboyant patterns committing every artistic sin” it had been “stripped off” the walls in “great patches” (Gilman, 781). As the story continues the wallpaper gains more character that makes it less tasteless and more appealing to the main character. She begins to see a woman in the wallpaper and it seems as if the woman is trying to tell her something. She begins to sympathize with the woman trapped in the
She wanted people to see that the resting cure which was highly praised does not work. In fact it drives the ill quite insane being kept from the outside world and not being able to have a purpose other than to lay in bed all day. During this time period women really had no say over anything not even themselves. When the narrator of the story suggests to her husband her ideas of what is happening to her he just laughs at her for it. This is because when a woman would express her observations to a man it was taken as “an indication of her self-conceit” (Thrailkill, 526). Gilman wanted to get people questioning this rest cure and questioning gender roles and why women had no say over themselves and looked at as incompetent