Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s short story The Yellow Wallpaper follows one woman’s decent into insanity as the subconscious takes control over her mind while locked in a solitary room with ugly yellow wallpaper. The treatment forced on the narrator allows her to give in to the hidden desires for freedom, a feeling manifested in the walls of her isolated room.
A few clues given to the reader indicate possible diagnoses. Her mentions of anxiety and crying episodes coupled with the fact that she recently had a baby suggest postpartum depression, a condition caused by hormone changes after a woman bears a child. However, as her symptoms start to trend toward manic, a doctor could propose postpartum psychosis; this more severe condition would explain her hallucinations of the woman in the wallpaper and her emotional attachment to the ugly yellow design.
While putting names to her symptoms may lead to treatment in the present day, it would not help the damage already inflicted on the woman, damage that could have been avoided. Perkins says that in writing this story, she intended not to “drive people crazy, but to save people from being driven crazy” (18), and by showing one woman’s spiral into insanity, she exposes the wrongs in psychological treatment in the late 19th century. The story alludes to other psychiatric patients before the narrator who have lost their minds in the very same room, whose ghosts still linger in the walls. This short story wasn’t about a singular woman’s struggle with insanity, but an entire population’s struggle with psychiatric treatment. Gilman wrote the story to set right the doctor that almost made her crazy, and to prevent people from falling to the same fate.
