The Yellow Wallpaper

The Yellow Wallpaper

The Yellow Wallpaper is a story about a lady that suffered from depression. But in her day, this was thought of as a sickness instead of depression. Since her husband John was a doctor, she trusted him to know best about her situation and treat her with the best of care, especially since this was her soul mate. To treat this sickness, most women in this position were told to sleep a lot and were forbidden to do any work. Her husband would also give her drugs to make her drowsy, as did most of the women of that day when they were in the same condition. One thing her husband made her do was take at least an hour nap after each meal. She would always lay down for that hour but managed to get very little sleep in the hour she was lying down.

One of the things her husband did was rent a house out in the country for three months because a highly reliable and well-known doctor recommended it. The room that this lady stayed in was kind of like a prison in some ways. For example: the bed was nailed to the ground, it was in an attic on the top floor, and the window was covered by bars, so the person in the room was not able to get out of the window. But the confusing thing is that the door was locked from the inside, and people were not able to access this room unless a key was present or if the door was unlocked from the inside. This is the room that this lady spent most of her time in. At one point, the lady thought she saw a little girl outside the window, but she was actually remembering herself as a little child.

At this time, in America, women such as this were thought of as being crazy and being a hypochondriac. So when this lady kept her diary she didn't like people to see her writing, or even know that she did any writing at all. This had to do with what people would think if they found out what she really felt like. She especially did not want her husband to know because of how much work he was doing to try to help her. He went out of his way to get the house they were using for the three months to help her feel better.

This room was made of yellow wallpaper and this wallpaper was the kind that had different designs in it but was not made into a particular design. As most people have done when they were children, she would look at the wall or a different solid object and see the designs in them and make all sorts of weird things. The only thing unusual about this was that, this was a grown woman that was doing it. Furthermore this woman considered the wallpaper