Seminar paper from the year 2008 in the subject American Studies - Literature, grade: 1,0, University of Vienna (Institut für Anglistik und Amerikanistik), course: Seminar des 2. Studienabschnitts, language: English, abstract: This paper seeks to shed light upon Charlotte Perkins Gilmans short story The Yellow Wallpaper (1892) - a text that has become an American feminist classic and has been interpreted as a transformed autobiography (Shulman, xix), as a journalistic/clinical account of a womans gradual descent into madness (Bak, 39), and in multiple ways as a critique of gender relations (Shulman, xix). It is a bitter story, as Ann J. Lane describes it, of a young woman driven to insanity by a loving husband-doctor, who, with the purest motives, imposed Mitchells rest cure (Lane, vii). The narrator of the story is diagnosed as suffering from a temporary nervous depression (W, 4), which is today known as postpartum depression, that is, a depression caused by profound hormonal changes after childbirth. Written some five years after the author herself, following the birth of her first child, became a mental wreck in need of a rest cure, The Yellow Wallpaper is a fictionalized account of Gilmans own subjection to the rest cure of Silas Weir Mitchell, whose mode of treatment so notoriously typified conventional late Victorian doctoring of women.

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