The Yellow Wallpaper, A Descen

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work and compulsion that had once served to distinguish public life from a sentimentary understood home" [Fleissner 59].
"The Yellow Wallpaper" is a fictionalized account of Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s own postpartum depression. Gilman was a social critic and feminist who wrote prolifically about the necessity of social and sexual equality, particularly about women’s need for economic independence. According to critic Valarie Gill,
"Gilman attached the nineteenth century’s configuration of private space as woman’s domain and its attendant generalizations about femininity. Gilman seeks to blur the distinction between private and public life. Gilman unflaggingly urged her audience to consider their logic in assigning women to the home. The composition of home life altered radically between the beginning and final decades of the nineteenth century" (17).
The narrator loves her baby, but knows she is not able to take care of him. "It is fortunate Mary is ...

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modernity would usher in a new ‘gynandrocratic’ era in which the sexes would move evolutionarily closer together" (72)
Because the story is written in diary format, we feel especially close to this woman. We are in touch with her innermost thoughts. The dominance of her husband, and her reaction to it, is reflected throughout the story. The narrator is continually submissive, bowing to her husband’s wishes, even though she is unhappy and depressed. Her husband has adopted the idea that she must have complete rest if she is to recover. "So I…am absolutely forbidden to ‘work’ until I am well again" (Gilman 357). John does not even want her to ...

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