The Yellow Wallpaper Is Still Tearing Women Apart A Century Later
Culture25 September 2026
AuthorSuhaila Atef
Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s narrator tore down yellow wallpaper to be seen. A century later, we still call women hysterical instead of sick.
H
ave you ever experienced something that only you can see, understand, and describe?
I was amazed when I learned that this book was published in 1892. More than a century later, women still have the same problems, face the same thoughts, and experience the same circumstances. More than a century was never enough to end the misery; it only reshaped it into a different form that feels the same.
The author experienced what was diagnosed at the time as “nervous prostration” after the birth of her daughter and underwent the famous “rest cure” associated with Dr. S. Weir Mitchell. It is common to connect this experience to the story, but calling it postpartum depression in the modern diagnostic sense feels somewhat outdated; it reduces her lived reality to a clinical label that didn’t exist then, and misses how her physical and emotional collapse was inseparable from the societal confinement she faced.
What fascinates me most is that the narrator’s “madness” is simultaneously her imprisonment and her only form of rebellion.
Women can live a full social life, have a job, friends, partners, and kids, and still struggle to survive. You can guess the struggles: being labeled a bad parent, having a cheating husband, and maybe one of the worst, postpartum depression. They are called hysterical, but never actually considered sick.
When I first read the book, I noticed three symbols: the wife, the nanny, and the husband. The author opens with a husband who clearly cares about his wife, a wife who obviously has something wrong, and an influenced nanny.
The description of the house, the garden, the couple’s bedroom, and lastly, the detailed, poetic, and miserable description of the yellow wallpaper all contribute to the atmosphere of the story.
Her husband, John, is a physician, and he constantly infantilizes her. He tells her what she can and cannot do, dismisses her own understanding of her condition, prevents her from writing, and decides that isolation will cure her. The irony is brutal: the treatment intended to restore her sanity is precisely what drives her deeper into psychological collapse.
“John says this, John says that.”
When I read the few lines the husband says, I remember asking myself, why is he caring and controlling at the same time? Could she be the problem? That’s when I realised that the author had made me think exactly as society does when it comes to women: to question the woman before questioning the circumstances around her.
Her husband, John, is a physician, and he constantly infantilizes her. He tells her what she can and cannot do, dismisses her own understanding of her condition, prevents her from writing, and decides that isolation will cure her. The irony is brutal: the treatment intended to restore her sanity is precisely what drives her deeper into psychological collapse.
“John says this, John says that.”
When I read the few lines the husband says, I remember asking myself, why is he caring and controlling at the same time? Could she be the problem? That’s when I realised that the author had made me think exactly as society does when it comes to women: to question the woman before questioning the circumstances around her.
The narrator felt like life was much more exciting when she clung to the idea that she herself must discover the identity of the woman behind the yellow wallpaper, only to discover later that this might be a version of herself. Only she sees it, and no one else does—even though she thought they noticed at first. Jennie and John both see the wallpaper, but neither of them truly looks at it.
They locked her up, and John got mad when she wrote. She saw the wallpaper as an object or maybe a distraction. The ambivalence lies in the fact that it is both her source of excitement and the source of her going “crazy.”
At the end of the book, she pulls off every piece of that yellow paper to break free from the confinement she has faced. She destroys everything. Whether this is a manifestation of her psychosis or the liberation of a woman she sees within herself, I’d like to think she destroyed it and then looked at her husband and said that, in spite of him and Jennie and their attempt to confine her, she has torn down the wallpaper so she can never be put back behind it—thinking they can never control her again. And that is a great metaphor for a woman who is ignored, confined for too long, and only receives a reaction when she does something “insane.”
So how long can a woman go unnoticed before she destroys everything?
