The Yellow Wallpaper: Crash Course Literature 407 - YouTube (2)
Jane, a character not mentioned until this point who may be herself?
But then comes this question mark which complicates everything and makes it ambiguous. Charlotte Perkins Gilman
Transformed her experience of enduring this rest cure into a story that invites us to reconsider gender dynamics
And the treatment of mental health disorders.
At the time of its publication the story may have inspired concrete change too. In an article published in
1913 Gilman claims that her story quote "has to my knowledge, saved one woman from a similar fate --
So terrifying her family that they let her out into normal activity and she recovered. But the best result is this. Many years later
I was told that my own doctor had admitted to friends of his that he had altered his treatment of
neurasthenia since reading The Yellow Wallpaper." stories affect the world in mysterious ways and if "The Yellow Wallpaper"
Helped end the practice of separating the sick from the world then I am grateful.
But I think the story has served another far more personal function. It has given form and expression to many people's
Experiences with mental illness including, I have to say, mine.
It's a story that explores the ways that physiological brain disorders can be hurt or
Helped by treatments and by the way the social order imagines and talks about mental illness. And although we no longer
Embrace rest cures we still have a long way to go when it comes to talking about mental illness without the stigmatization that can worsen
Suffering. But then also mental illness and the way it's discussed isn't the only Yellow Wallpaper
Out there. I wonder
What is the wallpaper
That constrains you and who else do you feel might be
imprisoned by its pattern?
How might you escape, how might you tell your story to
Influence others? Those questions haunted me when I first read Gilman's story in high school
And they shaped a lot of the ways that I think about writing today. More than 20 years later I'm still asking them.
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