![]() Virginia Woolf, Edith Wharton, and Jane Addams all took the cure, which could last for weeks, sometimes months. Mitchell administered this cure of extended bed rest and isolation to intellectual, active white women of high social standing. ![]() Silas Weir Mitchell, late-nineteenth-century physician to the stars. The story is based on Gilman’s experiences with Dr. Reading “The Yellow Wall-Paper” felt like a mix of voyeurism and recognition, morphing into horror. The unnamed first-person narrator goes through a mental dance I knew well-the circularity and claustrophobia of an increasing depression, the sinking feeling that something wasn’t being told straight. The rest cure caused the illness it claimed to eliminate. She thinks she’s a creature who has emerged from the wallpaper. On the last day of the treatment, the narrator is completely mad. ![]() I loved the unnerving, sarcastic tone, the creepy ending, the clarity of its critique of the popular nineteenth-century “rest cure”-essentially an extended time-out for depressed women. When I first read “The Yellow Wall-Paper” years ago, before I knew anything about its author, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, I loved it. ![]()
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