Charlotte Gilman's "The Yellow Wallpaper"

Wow.

This story is a must read. There are two themes that Gilman dwells on: the treatment of women in the 19th century and the debilitating aspects of temporary nervous depression. As the story progresses, the two themes merge together into a gripping climax. The woman is literally caged into a room in a new house that her husband, a physician, has bought for the family. The husband consistently tells her that her condition will only get better with rest and without pen and paper. This confinement, however, rather than alleviating her psychosis, causes her to go crazy towards the end of the story. Her nervousness is evident in her constant preoccupation with the smelly, ugly yellow wallpaper in her room.

At the beginning of the story, she tells the reader that her husband was going to install different wallpaper to allow the woman to keep her mind off of it, but then she writes that her husband told her "nothing was worse for a nervous patient to give way to such fancies." As the story progresses, her abhorrence towards the yellow wallpaper grows rapidly. She begins to imagine that there are women trapped behind the ugly wallpaper, one of whom is her. In desperation, she tears the wallpaper, but tries to hide her maniacal behavior from her husband. When John comes home, he finds that the woman has locked herself into the room. Once he gets in, John faints at the sight of his wife who is exhibiting extremely psychotic behavior.

The end of this story left a lasting lump in my throat. I was so moved by Gilman's attempt at equating the limited freedoms of women to the consequences of confining a patient with temporary nervous depression. The fact that the story was written in the first-person allowed the reader to witness the inner struggles of the woman first hand. She is torn between her love for her husband and her deep concern for her own well-being. Moving, to say the least.