Topic > The Woman Behind the Wallpaper - 1053

“The Yellow Wallpaper” by Charlotte Perkins describes how many 19th century women suffered from the oppression of a male-dominated society. This tale is extremely personal as Perkins draws inspiration from her own experiences and through her writing channels all of her feelings and thoughts about how women were treated medically during this time period. His purpose in writing "The Yellow Wallpaper" was in the hope that doctors, especially Dr. Weir Mitchell, would read the short story and change their method of treatment. The narrator of the story represents Perkins and the woman in the background represents all the women of the 1800s, including Perkins, and their struggle to free themselves from male oppression; the story also dramatizes Perkins' personal goals of helping women break free from their constraints through the narrator and his relationship with the woman in the background. In "The Yellow Wallpaper" Perkins tries to insert the essence of his own experiences through the unnamed narrator to give the story that added sense of reality. “On March 23, 1885, she gave birth to a daughter. But feelings of 'nervous exhaustion' immediately descended upon her, and she became a 'mental wreck'” (Ceplair 17). Likewise, the narrator gives birth to a baby boy and begins to suffer from the same symptoms that Perkins had suffered from. Unfortunately, doctors of the time did not know the disease of postpartum depression, and all female nervous disorders were linked to hysteria. In an article "Why I Wrote the Yellow Wallpaper" Perkins talks about Dr. Weir Mitchell, a specialist in nervous diseases, and says: "This wise man... applied the cure of the rest... concluded that there was nothing that was wrong with me, and sent me home with so... half a paper...... that the extra "embellishments and additions" stories were supposed to "realize the ideal" and have such a strong impact on the people that something should have been done about the way the women were diagnosed and treated. After Mitchell read the story, he changed his treatment, meaning Perkins' mission was a success it was intended to drive people crazy, but to keep them from going crazy, and it worked." (The Forerunner, 1913) Works Cited Ceplair, Larry. Charlotte Perkins Gilman: A Reader of Nonfiction. New York: Columbia University Press, 1991. Print.Perkins, Charlotte. "Why I wrote the yellow background." The Forerunner, October 1913. Web. 16 Feb 2012. Perkins, Charlotte. "The yellow wallpaper." Literature: an introduction to fiction, poetry and drama. Ed. XJ Kennedy and Dana Gioia. 11th ed. New York: Longman, 2010. 436-47. Press.