Essay About Charlotte Perkins Gilman And Types Of Intellectual Stimulation

The Yellow Wallpaper
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Charlotte Perkins Gilman was born in Hartford,
Connecticut on July 3, 1860. From the day of her
birth, she was a woman ahead of her time. In 1890,
she wrote The Yellow Wallpaper a story about a
woman who was oppressed by her husband and her
illness. This, Gilmans most famous work, was written
from her own experience in life.
In 1884, Charlotte Perkins married Charles Walter
Stetson and had one daughter. Following the birth of
her daughter, she was greatly depressed and took a
therapeutic 3 month trip to California. Dr. Silas Weir
Mitchell was consulted in 1884 by Mr. Stetson to
treat his wife for what was then called hysteria. Dr.
Mitchells treatment involved complete isolation and
the removal of anything that might cause “mental
stimulation,” and so Charlotte spend her 3 months
isolated in a room in a large country estate,
estranged from her daughter and husband. Following
her divorce from her husband in 1894, Charlotte
Perkins Stetson became a committed social activist
and feminist. Later, in 1900, she married her first
cousin, George Houghton Gilman. It is believed that
this was a marriage of convenience, allowing
Charlotte to concentrate on her writings by not being
in a marriage that involved love and duty, but mutual
respect.
Charlotte Perkins Gilman wrote primarily of the
suppression of women. She experienced as a child
many restrictions imposed by her mother,
estrangement from her father because of her parents
divorce at a young age, and the disappointment with
not having the freedom to grow as a person while
married to Stetson. She wrote of what she knew and
experienced.
In The Yellow Wallpaper, the narrator is a woman
who has been diagnosed with a “temporary nervous
depression.” Because of her condition, she is
restricted by her doctor and her husband from all
types of intellectual stimulation. Just like Gilman, the
narrator is sent to a large, old country estate for 3
months in the summer to rest and relax, forbidden to
write. Throughout the story, she is inside a room with
yellow wallpaper. Just as women must do, she had
given up on staying in a sunny room downstairs when
her husband had dismissed her plea with so much
as consideration. She sees patterns in the paper that
look like bars and behind the pattern she sees
women.
The front pattern does move–and no wonder! The
woman behind shakes it! Sometimes I think there
are a great many women behind, and sometimes
only one, and she crawls around fast, and her
crawling shakes it all over. Then in the very bright
spots she keeps still, and in the very shady spots she
just takes hold of the bars and shakes them hard.
And she is trying to climb through that pattern–it
strangles so; I think that is why it has so many heads.
(299)
In these women, the narrator is seeing herself, but
she does not yet know it. The bars are society, the
women behind the bars are women like Gilman trying
to break free and be strong and independent.
Society and men are keeping these women down
and strangling them. In the “very bright spots,” the
woman keeps still, and in the darker places she is
trying hard to escape. This represents the narrators