I Get Her Condition, but What about the Rest of the Story?

"Now why should that man have fainted?  But he did, and right across my path by the wall, so that I had to creep over him every time!" 

-From Charlotte Perkins Gilman's "The Yellow Wallpaper," in Donald Keesey's Contexts for Criticism, page 538 

Although this story seems to be easily understood by most of my classmates, I had a lot of trouble understanding exactly what happened in the end.  I understood right away, before researching the author, that this story was obviously written in a feminist perspective by a woman (thus allowing me to assume that she was a feminist), that she wrote this about a woman who’s concerns were pushed aside by her husband in a time when women had few rights, that Gilman seemed to want the reader to believe that the woman had some form of mental illness after having a baby because of her constant references to her “condition,” etc.(diagnosed as postpartum depression by most of you), and that, at the end of the story, the reader is supposed to believe that the main character’s  husband’s lack of attention or rather his misplaced attention, causes the woman to go insane because of her illness.  However, the last line that I quoted above made me look at the story again, as did a few opinions of my classmates. 

First, this line stumped me.  Why would an apparently sane, stable doctor faint when he saw his wife walking around the room with a rope around her?  Wouldn’t he run to her to help her?  He obviously knew something was wrong with her, or he would not tell her to rest, he would not keep her from heavy entertaining and exercise, he would not constantly offer positive comments to her, and he would not have search for an axe to break down the door when she locks it.  Then I began to wonder if she somehow killed her husband.  Why else would she be able to creep over and over him for a seemingly long time without someone else finding them or without him awaking?  Perhaps this could all be in her mind, but I think that there must be some other explanation.

After I noticed this line, I looked at what others had to say about the story.  I found a consensus- most believed that the woman in the story has postpartum depression.  However, after reading about her hallucinations her movements, and her mood swings, I decided to research postpartum depression a bit further.  I have taken an Introduction to Psychology course that included a brief discussion of postpartum depression, and from what I remembered, this woman in the story obviously has more severe symptoms.   At mayoclinic.com, I discovered that there are three stages of postpartum depression: the “baby blues,” postpartum depression, and postpartum psychosis.  While the postpartum symptoms seem to fit with her behaviors at the start of the story, they do not fit with her hallucinations revolving around the moving of the wall and the creeping woman outside the house.  Postpartum psychosis; however, does.  Symptoms include “confusion and disorientation, hallucinations and delusions, paranoia, and attempts to harm [oneself] or the baby” (Mayoclinic.com).  The website also said that this is an extremely uncommon occurrence. 

I found it very interesting that this author would write such a severe case of mental illness into a story during this time period without actually knowing that it could occur, so she must have experienced this first-hand, through a story, or through a friend or relative.  The biographical information that I could find suggested that Gilman herself may have had postpartum depression and that this story was in fact partially autobiographical; however I highly doubt that she suffered from such severe symptoms because she went on to divorce, become involved in feminist and literary organizations, married again, and seems to have used work as a cure for her condition (this information is from wikipedia.org , and may not be the best of information, but it seems to have reliable sources). 

I do not wish to simplify Gilman’s life’s battles, only to bring to light that it is probably very unlikely for her to have recovered from an illness such as the one in her story by going to work when today three types of medication and sometimes even electroconvulsive therapy are used as treatments (mayoclinic.com).  

However, because this week’s topic is author’s intent, I did a little more research to try to find out more about her when I came upon this article: “Why I Wrote The Yellow Wallpaper” by Gilman herself. In the final line of the article, she writes, “It was not intended to drive people crazy, but to save people from being driven crazy…”  I think that this quote may bring readers as close as possible to understanding the purpose story,  which is very possible since she devoted her later life to working for women, but hopefully someone will be able to help me understand the ending of the story a bit better.