Jonathan Harrison Jan 10, 2009


Charlotte Perkins Gilman






"Charlotte Perkins Gilman suffered a very serious bout of post-partum depression in the months after Katharine's birth. This was an age in which woman were seen as "hysterical" and "nervous" beings; thus, when a woman claimed to be seriously ill after giving birth, her claims were sometimes dismissed as being invalid. Doctors at the time referred to this as “nervous prostration." (wikipedia)

This quote is significant for it gives us a real life insight into the mind of Charlotte Perkins Gilman. She did not make up the circumstances in the Yellow Wallpaper, unfortunately they were all too real. To realize that the author actually dealt with the awful situation bestowed upon her gives the story that much more credability.

This quote seems to be a direct influence into Gilman's thought process while writing the short story " The Yellow Wall-paper" for the main character undergoes the exact same symptoms that afflict Gilman in real life. The story itself is a cry for attention to the unequal treatment of women in the late 1800's. Women were considered at the time to be the weaker sex and thus their rights and opportunities were extremely limited. The Yellow Wall-paper is an angonizing story where you slowly watch the main character go crazy. She begins to have illusions and instead of getting better the forced rest she is undertaking is making her expontentally worse. She begins to see herself in the wall trapped behind the stripes which in turn become jail bars and the visual of the lady shaking the bars signifies not only herself being trapped and confined to a crazy house but to the confinement of all women kind at that time. "and she is all the time trying to climb through. But nobody could climb through the pattern- it strangles so; I think that is why it has so many heads." This quote again reitterates the fact that women are being held down and are almost prisoners of their own home. Too much thinking or even activity being looked down upon, it is almost hard not to look at the situation that society puts women into at the time, as a jail. Gilman is definately writing to get our attention about a gross injustice that needed to be changed. The whole womens rights movement was a slow moving beast but without the writings of peope such as Charlotte Perkins Gilman noned of the events that followed would have been possable at all.