Self-Expression: Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper”

Self-expression can be defined as someone who expresses their thoughts, feelings, and opinions through writing, a work of art, or anything they can get their hands on to just express themselves. Self-expression seems to be the main theme in the story. Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper” can suggest that women in the 19th century have no way of self-expressing themselves in the way they want to be heard.

Gilman wants us to know that the short story is written in first person point of view and it is giving us an inside glimpse on how women in the 19th century couldn’t express how they feel. How their husbands were on a higher level than the women. How the narrator’s husband dominates every aspect of her life, where she has no say so in what happens and how it happens. The narrator’s doctor who is also her husband, John diagnoses her with a mental disorder, which is called temporary nervous depression. John ends up putting her in a room with treatment that he calls his “resting cure”. The narrator describes the room she is put in. She describes it in her journal as “It is a big, airy room. It was nursery first and then playroom and gymnasium, I should judge; for the windows are barred for little children, and there are rings and things in the walls. The paint and paper look as if a boys’ school had used it” (Gilman 474). The narrator is getting treated like a child from her husband because he doesn’t want her to do much of anything under his supervision.

What John doesn’t know is that his “resting cure” is doing more harm than good with secluding her from her everyday life. This so called “resting cure” doesn’t do much help with her depression, it causes her to rebel against her husband and she starts to write in her journal. “I did write for a while in spite of them; but it does exhaust me a good deal — having to be so sly about it, or else meet with heavy opposition” (Gilman 473). The narrator describes that when she writes she must do it in secrecy, so her husband won’t find out because it is basically forbidden in the household. She can’t express herself when her husband is in the room, so she writes how she feels in her journal. The narrator for so long couldn’t express how she felt to her husband with being secluded from her family and being in the same room for so long. It causes her to become insane with her inner thoughts and it makes her goes crazy.

The narrator says “The front pattern does move—and no wonder! The woman behind shakes it! Sometimes I think there are a great many women behind. Then in the very bright spots she keeps still, and in the very shady spots she just takes hold of the bars and shakes them hard.” (Gilman 481). She literally goes so insane, writing in her journal saying that she is seeing women trapped in the wallpaper.

Sadly, all this “resting cure” makes the narrator go insane. The more we value expressing our opinions, thoughts, and feelings in works of arts, writing in a journal, and other things that will let someone express themselves. This is the true nature of self-expression. If John would have valued his wife’s opinions and thoughts, she wouldn’t have gone mentally insane in this short story. She would have been able to speak for herself and how she feels about being stuck in a room that was used for various of things. In conclusion, the narrator’s confinement in the house, and her thoughts and opinions dominated and victimized from the people around her made her go mentally crazy.

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