Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’: On How Female Creativity Combats Madness and Domestic Oppression.

Abstract

In the nineteenth century domestic confinement and women’s oppression were often associated with madness. Many women writers have openly written about them from first hand experience. On occasion, madness was a means of escape but also a way to obtain economic freedom and gain independence from patriarchal structures. The purpose of this article on Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s short story “The Yellow Wallpaper” is twofold: first, to demonstrate that educated women used writing as a means of healing and liberation from patriarchy; and second, to prove that female breakdown was employed in nineteenth-century literature as a way to degrade women both physically and emotionally. The article shows that when writing about madness, women are able to alter convention and tradition and in doing so take control of themselves.