“The Yellow Wallpaper” A theme of Inequality.

Cynthia Welman


3rd June 2003

“The Yellow Wallpaper” A theme of Inequality.

In Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s short story, The Yellow Wallpaper, the theme of
social inequality for women, is further developed when the main character slowly goes
from post partum depression to severe manic depression, directly resulting from the
treatment prescribed by her husband physician.
At the time the story was written Ms.Gilman had herself recovered from a
depression despite the advice from a well noted physician, as she notes in her response to
critics in her article entitled, Why I Wrote "The Yellow Wallpaper", which appeared in
the October issue of the Forerunner. (Gilman 1) “For many years I suffered from a severe
and continuous nervous breakdown tending to melancholia--and beyond. During about
the third year of this trouble I went, in devout faith and some faint stir of hope, to a noted
specialist in nervous diseases, the best known in the cou...