Charlotte Perkins Gilman was born with the name Charlotte Anna Perkins …show more content…
Three moths after they got married, the couple learned they were expecting their first child. The pregnancy wasn’t easy for Gilman she began to suffer from symptoms of depression. They named their daughter, Katharine Beecher Stetson; she was the only child of the couple. After Katharine’s birth, Charlotte suffered with severe post-partum depression. During this time if a women claimed to be ill after her child’s birth she was ignored because women were considered nervous beings. Gilman went to a sanatorium in Philadelphia in 1887 where she was treated by Dr. Silas Weir Mitchell, who is the doctor in “The Yellow Wallpaper”. His rest cure included no physical or intellectual stimulation, which meant she couldn’t write.
Gilman and Stetson separated in 1888, which was rare in that time; they finalized their divorce in 1984. Gilman sent her daughter to live with her ex-husband and his new wife. She moved to California and became active in social reform, mostly with women suffrage movements. She also began to write more while she was out there. After her mother’s death in 1893, she moved back east and got in contact with her first cousin, Houghton Gilman. They had begun spending a lot of time together and became romantically involved, which wasn’t rare in that time. They got married in 1900 and lived in New …show more content…
John is treating his wife for her post-partum depression. The cure he tries with his wife is the rest cure. He confines her to a room upstairs which once was a nursery. Throughout the story, the yellow wallpaper on the walls torments the narrator. She describes the color and patterns soon becoming obsessed with it. She even begins to imagine a woman trapped behind the wallpaper, this is symbolic of herself being trapped in the room. The story ends with the narrator tearing the wallpaper off the walls causing her husband to think she’s even more crazy then first