Who Is Charlotte Perkins Gilman's The Yellow Wallpaper?

Charlotte Perkins Gilman was a writer and social activist of the late 1800s and early 1900s. As a feminist, she published her first nonfiction work “Woman and Economics”, she believed women had to gain economic independence. Gilman’s best known story “The yellow wallpaper” could be seen as autobiographical. She married artist Charles Stetson and had a daughter named Katherine. In the course of her marriage she suffered from depression and went through rest cure treatments in where eventually caused her to escape with Katherine from her husband. The escape from the rest cure treatments improved her severe condition. Her experiences with the treatment inspired her to write “The yellow wallpaper”. To express how she feels about society and their
The narrator, which is the main character in this story is diagnosed with a severe nervous depression. Her husband John and the narrator's brother are physicians, in order for her depression to go away they prescribed her with the rest cure treatment in where she is basically “absolutely forbidden to "work" until I am well again.”. This treatment was popular back then for women to practice, Gilman herself was put into “rest cure”. In her autobiography, “The Living of Charlotte Perkins Gilman”, it describes what she experienced during her rest cure treatment “Gilman wrote, she “came perilously near to losing my mind. The mental agony grew so unbearable that I would sit blankly moving my head from side to side” (Stiles, 1). The narrative criticizes Dr. S. Weir Mitchell and it addresses the poor treatment the late nineteenth century had to cure depression. Gilman believed that the rest cure was a cruel way for man to reinforce gender roles, by keeping women locked in their house, and restricting them to work on their imagination and gain more knowledge. The way doctors treated their female patients have shown men repression towards