The Yellow Wallpaper Essay | Critical Essay #1

The Yellow Wallpaper Critical Essay #1

Rena Korb is a writer and editor. In the following essay, Korb discusses "The Yellow Wallpaper" as a story of female confinement and escape.

In 1913, more than twenty years after the first publication of "The Yellow Wallpaper," Charlotte Perkins Gilman wrote that she devised the story, "to save people from being driven crazy." Gilman had suffered a near mental breakdown herself, and had been prescribed a rest treatment very similar to that prescribed to the narrator in "The Yellow Wallpaper." For Gilman, the act of resuming her normal life, which certainly included writing, was what restored her health. Though we don't know what became of Gilman's narrator, we can chronicle Gilman's own life after her near mental breakdown. If Gilman's narrator in "The Yellow Wallpaper" regressed into her insanity, Gilman certainly did not; unlike the narrator she created, she made her voice heard. She pursued her career...
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