He is driven purely by practicalities, prescribing self-control above all else, and warning against anything that he sees as indulging his wife’s dangerous imagination or hysteria. As such, he is a model of traditional attitudes toward mental illness. John, the narrator’s husband, serves also as her de facto doctor.

The forced confinement of the story’s narrator, and her husband’s injunctions against writing or other activity, mirror this ‘rest cure’ in the author’s life. She underwent a mental breakdown as a result of this enforced idleness, which forbade any form of writing or work outside of the domestic sphere. Silas Weir Mitchell, who is mentioned by name in her tale. Charlotte Perkins Gilman, the author of the story, suffered from post-partum depression and, in circumstances very similar to those of the story’s narrator, was prescribed a ‘rest cure’ by Dr. In one sense, then, the story is a propaganda piece criticizing a specific way of ‘curing’ mental illness.

In the style of a Gothic horror story, the tale follows the gradual deterioration of its narrator’s mental state, but it also explores the ways that her husband John’s attempted treatment aggravates this decline. Reading the series of diary entries that make up the story, the reader is in a privileged position to witness the narrator’s evolving and accelerating descent into madness, foreshadowed by her mounting paranoia and obsession with the mysterious figure behind the pattern of the yellow wallpaper.Īs the portrayal of a woman’s gradual mental breakdown, The Yellow Wallpaper offers the reader a window into the perception and treatment of mental illness in the late nineteenth century.

The yellow wallpaper setting