Marggiori Salas Professor Cordell Composition II 7/26/12 The Meaning Behind “The Yellow Wallpaper” Charlotte Perkins Gilmanʼs “The Yellow Wallpaper” is a story of a woman who is not only trapped in a room but is trapped in her mind by her seemingly loving and patient, husband John. He is a physician and believes his wife’s nervous condition is curable by isolating her in a room without any mental stimulation including: exercise, work, reading, writing or any kind of excitement. This was called a “rest cure” at the time the story was written. Gilman herself was treated in this way and the story is a fictional version of her own experience. Gilman removed herself from the treatment when she realized it was not working. The wife in this story secretly writes in a journal like Gilman regardless of what her husband might say. Gradually, she starts to write more and more about the yellow wallpaper since this is the only stimulating thing in the room. The wallpaper increasingly fascinates her until it seems to her to have a life of it’s own and she ends up losing her sanity. This story is an example of how a wife and mother was perceived in the turn of the century as a fragile, helpless creature, without a voice beyond her husbands and how this woman ultimately proves how ineffective this treatment is in the worst possible way. The narrator starts out saying the house her husband has rented is haunted, leading us to believe she is already not content with her husbands decision about how she should be treated. Her thoughts of the house are already negative. She is kept in a room upstairs instead of the room she wants which is downstairs and opens onto thepiazza with roses growing around it. This upstairs nursery is more isolated than the room downstairs and she is wary of this. As Linda