Who Is The Yellow Wallpaper By Charlotte Perkins Gilman?

Charlotte Perkins Gilman held many titles throughout her life including: suffragist, lecturer, artist, divorcee, publisher, wife, and mother. Gilman is known to have wanted to keep her personal life and her own life separate, however we see that it was inevitable in her writing. In 1884 she began suffering terrible depression after marrying Charles Walter Stetson. She believed that her roles as a wife and mother were the cause of her depression.
It is believed that her ever famous short story “The Yellow Wall-paper” was inspired by her depression and the highly out of the ordinary treatments she underwent for it. The same as the narrator in the story, Gilman had looked for psychological help from S. Weir Mitchell who was a famous neurologist at the time. The treatment that was offered to her directly parallels that which was given to the main character in “The Yellow Wall-paper.” The following is a passage from Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s, “Why i Wrote the Yellow Wall-paper” an article she wrote in The Forerunner in 1913. “The wise man put me to bed and applied the rest cure, to which a still good physique responded so promptly that he concluded that there was nothing much the matter with me, and sent me home with solemn advice
Following Katharine’s birth Gilman was said to have suffered severely from post-partum depression. In “The yellow Wall-paper” due to the mention that their is a newborn child that the main character is not allowed to see leads to the assumption that she is also enduring post-partum depression. Social norms of that time prevented anyone from believing in the validity of this mental illness. It seems that this was solely for the fact that the only people who could claim this illness were women. It is understandable being that during the 19th century women were seen as neurotic if they divulged their symptoms to boost the male