[Keisha Kirby]

[Tamar Jacobs]

[English 102]

[14 October 2010]

A Cry for Help

Introduction

As somebody who nearly was decimated by S. Weir Mitchell's “resting cure” for despondency, it is not surprising that Gilman organised her article as an attack on this ineffective and fiendish course of treatment. “The Yellow Wallpaper” is an illustration of the way a brain that is already inundated with disquiet can worsen and start to prey on itself when it is compelled into inactivity and kept from healthy work. To his credit, Mitchell, who is cited by title in the story, took Gilman's condemnation to heart and forsaken the “resting cure.” after the exact technique described in the story, Gilman means to admonish any pattern of health care that disregards the concerns of the persevering, contemplating her only as a passive object of treatment.

Discussion

The connection between a woman's subordination in the dwelling and her subordination in a doctor/patient connection is clear—John is, after all, the narrator's spouse and doctor. Gilman suggests that both types of administration can be easily misused, even when the husband or medical practitioner means to help. All too often, the women who are the quiet subjects of this administration are infantilized, or worse. The Yellow Wallpaper”, a short allegorical stroy by Charlotte Perkins Gilman is the disheartening tale of a woman pain from postpartum despondency (Nicholas Delbanco & Alan Cheuse, 221-228).

Set during the late 1890s, the article displays the mental and emotional outcomes of the typical "rest cure" prescribed during that era and the narrator's answer to this course of remedy. It would emerge that Gilman was composing about her own anguish as she herself underwent such a remedy with Dr. Silas Weir Mitchell in 1887, just two years after the birth of her female child Katherine. The rest therapy that the narrator in "The Yellow Wallpaper" describes is very close to what Gilman herself skilled; therefore, the allegorical story can be read as mirroring the sentiments of women like herself who endured through such treatments. Because of her practical knowledge with the rest therapy, it can even be said that Gilman founded the narrator in "The Yellow Wallpaper" roughly on herself. Throughout the plot of “The Yellow Wallpaper” there are many instances that show that the narrator was based upon Charlotte Perkins Gilman views on her own life (Nicholas Delbanco & Alan Cheuse, 221-228).

Depression

The two common themes that connect Charlotte Perkins Gilman and the narrator in her story ...