How is mental illness depicted in "The Yellow Wallpaper"?

In this story, mental illness is represented as something that is improperly understood, diagnosed, and treated.  To suggest that a woman who suffers from postpartum depression, for which they did not have a name or concept, should be whisked away from family and friends and confined in solitude to a bedroom is more than ridiculous: it seems tantamount to torture.  The narrator is not allowed to do anything under the "rest cure" pioneered by Weir Mitchell, the doctor referenced in the story.  At the time, it was believed that if a woman exercised her brain too much, her blood would rush there, away from her reproductive organs, and this would throw her bodily functions off-balance.  The rest cure, then, called for perfect and complete "rest": no reading, no writing, no working, really, no thinking.  

Further, to call any mental ailment affecting a woman "hysteria" belittles the problem; it makes it seem as though the woman's constitution is simply weak, her will to improve her health too insignificant.  The narrator's husband, a doctor, also refers to her by diminutive nicknames, calling her things like "blessed little goose," making it apparent that he does not take her or her complaints seriously.  The narrator feels herself to be truly suffering, but she says, "John does not know how much I really suffer.  He knows there is no reason to suffer, and that satisfies him."  We can see, then, that even the doctor does not take his wife's mental illness seriously. In fact, he makes it a great deal worse by using a treatment that makes no medical sense and by holding opinions about women that cannot be supported.

How is mental illness depicted in "The Yellow Wallpaper"?

The main character in "The Yellow Wallpaper," Jane, is mentally ill. The story, written in first person epistolary style, is rife with dramatic irony because of its unreliable narrator. Readers have to ferret out the true psychological condition from what Jane says and from what she doesn't exactly say.

At the beginning of the story, Jane suffers from what today's mental health professionals would term post-partum depression. The baby isn't mentioned often, but the couple has retained hired help to care for the baby because he makes Jane "so nervous." Jane's husband, a physician, tells her she has "temporary nervous depression" and "a slight hysterical tendency," but "he does not believe [she] is sick." Thus he prescribes various tonics, but the primary therapy is "the rest cure," which means she isn't allowed to do any work or to socialize much.

Under the negative effects of the rest cure, Jane's condition becomes progressively worse through the story, but the reader must glean that information through the sometimes misleading descriptions Jane gives. She begins obsessing about the wallpaper fairly early in the story. Then her depression worsens--she reports that she cries at nothing, and she cries most of the time, except when John is around. She begins to grow confused, saying it takes "great effort for me to think straight." She then begins to hallucinate, seeing things behind the wallpaper, eventually believing that a woman is trapped there.

As her psychosis worsens, she becomes paranoid. She admits she is "getting a little afraid of John," and she suspects Jennie, John's sister, of being false toward her. She becomes manic, hardly sleeping at all at night. Her hallucinations worsen so that she has olfactory hallucinations. She starts to have violent thoughts and actions toward herself and others. All the furniture is removed from her room to prevent her from hanging herself, but she still smuggles a rope into her room somehow. She bites off the corner of the bed frame in anger. She sees creeping women outside now as well as the one in her room.

At the end of the story, she has become completely psychotic and dissociated, believing that she is now the woman behind the wallpaper, and she refers to herself (Jane) in the third person and doesn't recognize her husband. 

The story shows that ignorance and shame regarding mental illness causes doctors and family members to recommend therapy that actually worsens the condition.  

How does mental illness function in "The Yellow Wallpaper"? What is a possible thesis statement?

At the time that The Yellow Wallpaper was written and published, it was common for women to be diagnosed with a mental illness known as "hysteria." In the nineteenth century, hysteria was understood to be an exclusively female affliction.

One of the forms of curing hysteria was a method known as the "rest cure," which involved isolating a woman and forbidding her from "mentally strenuous" activities such as reading and writing. Instead, the woman was expected to participate in "domestic" activities, or she was confined to complete bed rest. This is the situation that the woman in The Yellow Wallpaper finds herself in. She has been diagnosed with "a temporary nervous depression—a slight hysterical tendency," and as a result, she is made to retire to an old mansion for the summer.

The woman and her husband move into the upstairs nursery. As part of her treatment, the woman is forbidden from working, despite her protests that she wishes to do so. She does not want to be isolated, particularly not from her child. However, as she has been deemed to be of unsound mind, her pleas are not taken as rational and are altogether ignored. The rest of the story details the woman's descent into madness. She begins to hallucinate, culminating in a vision of a woman trapped behind the yellow wallpaper of the nursery.

The Yellow Wallpaper therefore highlights the mistreatment of women by the male-dominated medical sphere of the nineteenth century. A woman could be termed "hysterical" for behaving outside of the norms imposed upon her gender at the time. This is why hysteria was most often diagnosed in women who possessed an education and women who were writers. It is also why the most common treatment for hysteria was to force the woman to live a "domestic" life, as befitting her gender. A woman was considered to be cured of hysteria if she became "subdued, docile, silent, and, above all, subject to the will and voice of the physician." Mental illness in The Yellow Wallpaper therefore serves as a realistic symbol of the oppression and lack of agency that women at the time experienced.

How does mental illness function in "The Yellow Wallpaper" and why?

When one analyzes The Yellow Wallpaper, there is often immense focus given to the period in which the story is set and its treatment of women. Without such a focus on the feminist aspect of the literature, or perhaps entangled in it, is the idea of mental illness.

Mental illness in the story serves several functions. The first is a more historical insight into the way people with mental illness were treated in the time. The second is the way women with mental illness were specifically treated, especially in the upper class. The third serves as more of a metaphorical device within the story—which is what I will focus on for this question.

The narrator is brought to a summer retreat by her husband who happens to also be a physician. His diagnosis is that she has "temporary nervous depression, with a slight hysterical tendency." He believes this rest-retreat will allow her to recover fully. She is forbidden to encounter any work that requires concentration or intellectual function. She is to rest and exercise, and thus, spends most of the story in her room looking at the yellow wallpaper.

In terms of a literary device and how it captures a major theme of the story and with our narrator, what mental illness highlights is a profound loneliness. "The Yellow Wallpaper" is a story that is critiqued and analyzed endlessly. However, as a story that stands alone, mental illness within the story acts as a device to highlight the narrator's loneliness and her ostracism, especially from her marriage and the society she was born into.

How does mental illness function in "The Yellow Wallpaper" and why?

Mental illness is a driving force in Charlotte Perkins Gilman's story in terms of both character and plot. Because it is a psychological study, these two aspects are closely interrelated. The individual interpreter can therefore decide to focus on either aspect.

It is also important to keep in mind that medicine classified illness differently more than a century ago, and physicians understood body-mind relationships differently as well.

The most likely illness affecting the narrator is postpartum depression, given that she has a baby. She understands that there is something wrong that is other than the slight hysteria that her physician husband has diagnosed. Their complicated relationship, in which she cannot verbalize most of her symptoms and he does not listen to what she does say or has said before the action begins, show the characters's personalities.

The plot builds on this interpersonal, gender-related misunderstanding. The narrator is confined to a room she hates and is discouraged from writing, which she loves. She comes to see the room's decor as a physical manifestation of her unease or disease. Her perception of the room as having an alter-ego trapped behind the wallpaper offers evidence that her illness may be schizophrenia.

How does the author convey madness in the short story 'The Yellow Wallpaper'?

The madness in this excellent short story is conveyed through the peculiar obsession that the narrator has with the yellow wallpaper that covers her bedroom walls and which she comes to relate with more and more. As she stares again and again at this pattern, she comes to see a woman, or many women, behind the wallpaper, seemingly pushing against it and trying to get out. Note how she describes this sight:

The front pattern does move--and now 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.

The madness is conveyed through the narrator's increasing identification with this woman, until, at the very end of the story she identifies so strongly with her that she becomes that woman, walking around and around the edge of her room, physically expressing the mental and psychological entrapment she has experienced.

How does "The Yellow Wallpaper" address mental health and patient involvement in treatment?

To begin, the validity of the narrator's experience of mental illness is questioned by her husband, who is also her physician. She tells us in the opening paragraphs that he "laughs at [her]," and she expresses her belief that she does not get well more quickly because he "does not believe [she is] sick!" She asks, rather resignedly, "What can one do?" The narrator's illness is downplayed, and she is told that it does not exist; there is simply no way she would be asked to participate in a treatment plan because her doctor/husband is too busy trying to convince her that she is imagining her illness. Her husband, John, tells all of the narrator's friends and relations that she only has a "temporary nervous depression—a slight hysterical tendency," and her brother, also a doctor, says the same thing. Told that she is overreacting or making something out of nothing, she says,

I take phosphates or phosphites—whichever it is, and tonics, and journeys, and air, and exercise, and am absolutely forbidden to "work" until I am well again. Personally, I disagree with their ideas. Personally, I believe that congenial work, with excitement and change, would do me good.

Instead of being allowed to help determine the best course of treatment, however, the narrator is essentially locked into a room at the top of the house, forbidden to see family or friends—even when she specifically requests it—and prevented from employing her obviously intelligent mind by either reading or writing. The narrator's considerable vocabulary helps us to understand what a critical mind she has. For example, when describing the wallpaper in her room, she says,

I know a little of the principle of design, and I know this thing was not arranged on any laws of radiation, or alternation, or repetition, or symmetry, or anything else that I ever heard of. Looked at in one way each breadth stands alone, the bloated curves and flourishes—a kind of "debased Romanesque" with delirium tremens—go waddling up and down in isolated columns of fatuity.

In the absence of any other mental stimulation, this clearly intelligent woman is forced to ponder whatever is available to her: the terrible wallpaper. If she could devote her mind to the things that she enjoys, if she could read and write, or if her husband did not insist on "complete rest," then it seems quite likely that she would improve. One of the great ironies of this story is the fact that the "cure" actually makes her much more ill. Initially, she seems to have what we would now call postpartum depression, but, by the end of the story, she no longer recognizes her own identity and has taken on a fictitious new one that she has imagined. If this is the result of the "cure" suggested by the medical community, which never even validates the patient's own feelings let alone takes into account the patient's input about her treatment, we can only conclude that patient involvement is necessary in order to best serve the patient.

How does Charlotte Perkins Gillman present madness in 'The Yellow Wallpaper'?

In addition to merehughes excellent answer, I would just like to add that perhaps one of the reasons Gilman was able to depict madness with such a chilling accuracy is that she herself was subjected to the "rest cure" of her protagonist in the story.

After the birth of her first child in 1887, Gilman suffered from what we would now (hopefully) recognize as post-partum depression.  Severe cases were called "hysterics" (interesting to note, the term only applied to women...the uterus was thought to be the offending organ, hence the term "hysterectomy" for its removal.)

Gilman spent several months in bed and nearly lost her mind. One would think that such a practice has gone the way of the horse and buggy, but this is not so.  There is a wonderful story in the NY Times revealing its continued prevalance.  Sarah Bilston writes that bed rest... "is a standard means of treating just about any pregnancy-related problem in the United States. Indeed, doctors prescribe it for about one in five of all pregnant women, or around 750,000 women a year."

As a result, many women today continue to identify with Gilman's story of a woman pushed to the edge. 

How does Charlotte Perkins Gillman present madness in 'The Yellow Wallpaper'?

In the short story "The Yellow Wallpaper", the main character descends into madness.  Madness is presented in the story as a 'woman's' complaint and indeed the doctors and the main character's husband cite her hysteria as being the cause. She is forbidden to read or write or otherwise engage herself intellectually. The belief at that time was that intellectual pursuits could be a cause of madness or depression in women.

If one looks closely into the story, one can see that the narrator is projecting her  boredom and frustration onto the wallpaper.  She is imprisoned by her role in society at the time and so she projects the image of woman trapped in the wallpaper to express her own feelings.

Can you explain the two functions of mental illness in "The Yellow Wallpaper"?

Mental illness in the story serves several functions: the first being a more historical insight into the way people with mental illness were treated in the time. The second is the way women with mental illness were specifically treated, especially in the upper class.

Gilman mentions a noted real neurologist (who we might call a psychiatrist) of the time, Weir Mitchell, in her short story. In general, she wanted to critique his notion of a rest cure, an accepted practice of the period, which kept patients inactive and unable to occupy themselves on the principle that activity overtaxed their minds. (This approach was also used on Virginia Woolf, who also hated it.) This, Gilman illustrates in the story, is the wrong approach, as it drives a person deeper into mental illness rather than alleviating it.

Gilman also, in general, critiques the medical establishment of the time for ignoring the voice of the patient in making medical decisions. The narrator of "The Yellow Wallpaper" tries to tell her caregivers what she needs but is ignored. The stigma of being mentally ill negates the sick person's opinions, and this "othering" is wrong, according to Gilman.

All of this, as the story shows, is worse for a woman, who is already treated like a child by the society of her era. The story critiques treating upper-class woman as delicate and fragile flowers that have to be protected and especially criticizes keeping them from intellectual activity. Further, separating a mother from her child because of what looks like postpartum depression is not helpful: the narrator of the story would love to see her baby, but even supervised visits are not allowed.

Gilman argues that activity and being allowed to be a part of life are more helpful to a mentally ill woman (or person) than the isolation and forced inactivity that was the approach in her day.