"The Yellow Wallpaper" Charlotte Perkins Gilman

Chkaduni warned me this story would absolutely wreck me, and honestly… she was right. I still can’t get over the fact that Charlotte Perkins Gilman wrote something this powerful back in the late 19th and early 20th century. Her work is often called “the Bible of the women’s movement,” and after reading this, I completely get why. This particular story feels like a major turning point in how women’s mental health was talked about..

The main character is also a narrator, who live in a society where no one takes her seriously, where she has to fight just to tell her own story. She tries to explain herself, she tries to speak up, but she is completely alone in it. As a reader, even I don’t always know if I can fully trust her—but at the same time, I’m still listening. I still take her seriously. And that tension, that uncertainty, is what makes the whole thing hit even harder.

One of the saddest parts is realizing how deeply some behaviors have been normalized—even by women themselves. While reading, you can see how casually it’s accepted that men just act like this, and that it’s supposed to be normal. That line, “John laughs at me, of course, but one expects that in marriage,”  hits especially hard because of how casually it’s said.

She’s helpless in a quiet, painful way. She keeps asking, “what is one to do?” like she truly can’t see any other choice. She feels guilty for even feeling bad. She knows she is “loved,” she knows she’s being taken care of—but at the same time, that love is what’s suffocating her. It’s called protection, but it feels like a cage:

"He is very careful and loving, and hardly lets me stir without special direction."

"Dear John! He loves me very dearly, and hates to have me sick. I tried to have a real earnest reasonable talk with him the other day, and tell him how I wish he would let me go and make a visit to Cousin Henry and Julia.

But he said I wasn’t able to go, nor able to stand it after I got there; and I did not make out a very good case for myself, for I was crying before I had finished. It is getting to be a great effort for me to think straight. Just this nervous weakness I suppose.

And dear John gathered me up in his arms, and just carried me upstairs and laid me on the bed, and sat by me and read to me till it tired my head."

Cage full of such "Love" and "Care" is a Prison.

As if the cage wasn’t already enough, her pain isn’t even taken seriously. When she says, “John does not know how much I really suffer. He knows there is no reason to suffer, and that satisfies him,” it’s painful because it shows how her feelings are just dismissed as nothing. On top of that, she feels guilty for not being the “perfect” wife. When she says she wanted to be a help to John and now feels like a burden, you can really feel how deeply she’s blaming herself—for something that isn’t her fault at all. As if she can't feel sick, as if being sick is a crime.

  I said earlier that she is completely alone—but in a way, she isn’t. She represents so many women who were labeled with “nervous disorders.” Even in her breakdown, she understands that this isn’t just happening to her. When she says, “Sometimes I think there are a great many women behind, and sometimes only one,” it feels like she’s realizing that this pain is shared. That there are so many women trapped in the same invisible struggle, even if they can’t see each other clearly. And that makes the story feel even heavier.

This story was really emotional for me, mostly because it hurts to realize that it’s not just fiction. Women really had to tear down their own “yellow wallpaper,” and once it was gone, it could never be put back the same way. That part feels powerful and painful at the same time. But it also makes you stop and ask—why were they trapped there in the first place? is yellow wallpaper still around us? did we tear that down fully or not yet?