Charlotte Perkins Gilman's The Yellow Wallpaper. An analysis
Verena Schoerkhuber,Verena Schorkhuber
Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s The Yellow Wallpaper. An analysis
Verena Schoerkhuber,Verena Schorkhuber
Seminar paper from the year 2008 in the subject American Studies - Literature, grade: 1,0, University of Vienna (Institut fur Anglistik und Amerikanistik), course: Seminar des 2. Studienabschnitts, 40 entries in the bibliography, language: English, abstract: This paper seeks to shed light upon Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s short story The Yellow Wallpaper (1892) - a text that has become an American feminist classic and has been interpreted as a ‘transformed autobiography’ (Shulman, xix), as a ‘journalistic/clinical account of a woman’s gradual descent into madness’ (Bak, 39), and in multiple ways as a ‘critique of gender relations’ (Shulman, xix). It is a ‘bitter story’, as Ann J. Lane describes it, ‘of a young woman driven to insanity by a loving husband-doctor, who, with the purest motives, imposed Mitchell’s rest cure ’ (Lane, vii). The narrator of the story is diagnosed as suffering from a ‘temporary nervous depression’ (W, 4), which is today known as ‘postpartum depression’, that is, a depression caused by profound hormonal changes after childbirth. Written some five years after the author herself, following the birth of her first child, became ‘a mental wreck’ in need of a ‘rest cure’, The Yellow Wallpaper is a fictionalized account of Gilman’s own subjection to the rest cure of Silas Weir Mitchell, whose mode of treatment so notoriously typified conventional late Victorian doctoring of women .
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