Free Yellow Wallpaper Essays: An Essay :: Yellow Wallpaper essays

For the women in the twentieth century today, who overhear more freedom than before and have not experienced the depressive life that Gilman lived from 1860 to 1935, it is difficult to understand Gilmans situation and understand the significance of The Yellow Wallpaper. Gilmans original purpose of writing the story was to get in personal satis particularion if Dr. S. Weir Mitchell might change his treatment after reading the story. However, as Ann L. Jane suggests, The Yellow Wallpaper is the best crafted of her fiction a genuine literary piece...the most directly, obviously, self-consciously autobiographical of all her stories (Introduction xvi). And more importantly, Gilman says in her article in The Forerunner, It was not intended to drive masses crazy, but to save people from being driven crazy, and it worked (20). Therefore, The Yellow Wallpaper is a revelation of Charlotte Perkins Gilmans own emotions. When the story first came out in 1892 the critics considered The Yellow W allpaper as a portrayal of female insanity rather than a story that reveals an aspect of society. In The Transcript, a physician from Boston wrote, Such a story ought not to be written...it was enough to drive anyone mad to read it (Gilman 19). This statement implies that any woman that would write something to show opposition to the dominant social values must(prenominal) have been insane. In Gilmans time setting The ideal woman was not only assigned a social role that locked her into her home, but she was also expect to like it, to be cheerful and gay, smiling and good humored (Lane, To Herland 109). Those women who rejected this role and pursued intellectual enlightenment and freedom would be scoffed, alienated, and even punished. This is exactly what Gilman experienced when she tried to express her desire for independence. Gilman expressed her emotional and psychological feelings of rejection from society for thinking freely in The Yellow Wallpaper, which is a reaction to the f act that it was against the grain of society for women to pursue intellectual freedom or a career in the late 1800s. Her taking Dr. S. Weir Mitchells rest cure was the result of the pressures of these common social values. Charlotte Gilman was born on July 3, 1860, in Hartford, Connecticut in a family boasting a list of revolutionary thinkers, writers. And intermarriages among them were, as Carol Berkin put it, in discrete confirmation of their pride in association (18).