Genre and The Yellow Wallpaper - Essay Example

But I am sure that everything comes to be even much more simpler than it seems to be and that there are less hidden senses in this story than it is considered to be. At first glance the story described in the "Yellow Wallpaper" is quite typical for the 19th century. As a basis it describes "female hysteria" treating practice – the method invented by Dr. Mitchell, who believed that depression was brought on by too much mental activity (Dock, 61). It seems that from his point of view women were considered to be helpless creatures with delicate health, unable to make critical evaluation of reality.

So, following the recommendations of Dr. Mitchell, heroine`s husband makes her to practice «rest cure» (treatment by rest). After each meal he makes her to have a rest lying down for an hour. He forbids his wife to practice any intellectual work more than two hours a day. For the heroine of the story this course of treatment became to be a disaster. Soon she got a nervous breakdown, having no opportunity to work both physically and mentally. In such circumstances, unfortunate heroine of the story being locked in a room with yellow wallpaper and bolted-down bed unbearable went mad.

She became lost in delusions with no sense of reality, dreaming that it was she that trapped woman in the wallpaper. Investigators consider, that from the Gilman`s point of view “rest cure” method focuses on attempt to destroy woman’s creativity: by forcing the narrator to give up her writing, her husband hopes to calm down her anxious nature making her to act according to her ideal wife and mother position. It comes that society doesn`t ready to accept woman’s desire to have more in her life than her husband and child.

The desire to stay creative and socially active is the point which distinguished woman from the idealized standard. Thus, Gilman criticized not just the dependent position of women in society, but also the method of the