Today’s society
Charlotte Perkins Gilman was born in 1860 in Hartford, Connecticut. After suffering from depression throughout most of her life, she went to seek advise, and was told to stop during anything, that she normally did, because it would make her conditions worse. She therefore wrote The Yellow Wallpaper to express herself, and express the suffering she went through. Even though the society of the time period she was from criticized it, she argued that she wasn’t intending to drive people crazy, but to save people from being driven crazy by reading The Yellow Wallpaper. Gilman was so far ahead from her time period, that’s why her story was criticized, because she wrote about the topic; depression and mental illness, which for that time period was very frown upon and unspoken. It’s not better today, since depression is still something that people look down on, which is one of the reasons why we keep on reading The yellow wallpaper. Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s The Yellow Wallpaper is still an unbelievable relevant story because depression is still a big issue of society.
Suicide is more and more common, and most people find it the easiest way to end an issue or get rid of the pain. According to David Stolinsky the percentage of people who commit suicide in the early 1900s increased and decreased after the First World War. The highest rate of suicide in the 20th century, according to Stolinsky’s data, was 17.4 per 100,000 people in 1932. Which would be the same time period that Charlotte Perkins Gilman was suffering from her depression. In The Yellow Wallpaper she sort of describes how she felt during her depression. Gilman writes, “I am getting angry enough to do something desperate. To jump out of the window would be admirable exercise, but the bars are too strong to even try” (The Yellow Wallpaper, 778). Gilman shows that the thoughts in her mind can take over the actions if she doesn’t have enough self-control to stop herself from doing it. As an...