Essay Database

"The Yellow Wallpaper" by Charlotte Gilman is a dramatic story about a woman who is suffering from postpartum depression. The story illustrates the subjugated role of women prior to the feminist movement. When Gilman first wrote the tale it was deemed too offensive to print. "In the 1890s editors, and especially Scudder, still officially adhered to a canon of "moral uplift" in literature, and Gilman's story, with its heroine reduced at the end to the …

…The Yellow Wallpaper" showcases the inferior treatment of women in the 1800's and earlier. "Gilman's main purpose in writing The Yellow Wallpaper is to condemn not only a specific medical treatment but also the misogynistic principles and resulting sexual politics that make such a treatment possible" (Masterplots 3). The men in the story did not want to be bothered with understanding women and as a direct result of this could not possibly treat their female patients.