Nonetheless, notes one scholar, she shared some of his views. It was a new diagnosis at the time, and when physicians treated women with complaints for which they could find no obvious source, they turned to new diagnostic techniques and treatments.Ĭharlotte Perkins Gilman bucked hard against her treatment and her doctor’s misogynistic reign. “The Yellow Wallpaper” comes from Gilman’s own struggle with a “nervous disorder,” a depression for which she was treated by a physician named S. Instead, she focuses on Gilman’s own insistence that medical gender distinctions hurt female patients. Thrailkill warns against looking too hard for those meanings in the text. The tale, which follows its protagonist’s slow descent into madness as she gradually discerns a woman trapped inside the yellow wallpaper of her sickroom, has long been heralded as a feminist masterpiece, a cry against the silencing patriarchy.

And both carry uncomfortable echoes of Gilman’s creepy story. Both memoirs, published this year, focus on women whose physical symptoms are downplayed and disbelieved. That cry, uttered by the unnamed protagonist of Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s 1892 short story “The Yellow Wallpaper,” could just as well be that of Abby Norman, author of Ask Me About My Uterus, or Porochista Khakpour, author of Sick. “You see he does not believe I am sick!” she writes of her doctor husband. She sits in a room with yellow wallpaper, unable to convince the men around her that her suffering is real.

The woman is ill, but nobody believes her.

The yellow wallpaper literary analysis