Yellow Wallpaper and Other Writings Book

Wheeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee! Yup, that was me enjoying the spiralling descent into madness.

Ok all jokes aside, mental health is a serious issue and something which is more fragile than we realise - do not take it for granted people. We are lucky enough to live in a time when people recognise and understand depression and constructive, helpful treatments can be offered. Unfortunately for Charlotte Perkins Gilman, she inhabited the tail end of the Victorian Period when depression, post-natal or otherwise was a totally mysterious and misunderstood thing. A perfect Victorian solution to outward displays of "unusualness" was to put you in an assylum/prison/attic/foreign country (delete as viable depending on income and social status) and then just tell the neighbours that you were either indisposed for a reaaaaaaallllly long time, or that you were having a "little holiday". Similar to the little holiday you got sent on if you managed to get knocked up without having bagged yourself a husband first. Basically, you were disappeared for a while thus making everyone feel that society had been saved the awful sight of you making a show of yourself. Phew, well we wouldn't want to upset society now, heaven forbid!

The Yellow Wallpaper is Perkins Gilmans attempt to express the hopelessness of mental illness; effectively an invisible, inescapable cage around your mind (reflected by the imagery of the caged in woman locked behind the patterns in the wallpaper), which no one in the 1890s was capable of diagnosing correctly. Gilmans suffered from depression and so knew what she was writing about. I do always struggle with the idea of the self restraint which was exhibited by many of these women, the character in the Yellow Wallpaper included. If someone had repeatedly patronised me and told me that really there was nothing wrong with me apart from a mild case of nerves and the tendancy to be a bit hysterical, I'd have probably reacted by shouting

"HOW'S THIS FOR HYSTERICAL MOTHER F*CKER", before destroying all the furniture in the room. This snippet of text is short, sharp and truly sad with a suitably ambiguous ending, after all where does the madness end?