Charlotte Stenson: The Yellow Wall-Paper

Charlotte Perkins Stetson’s The Yellow Wall-Paper piece introduces mental health awareness into women’s literature. The first quote that I thought was interesting from the piece stated, “And it is like a woman stopping down and creeping about behind that pattern.” I thought that this was interesting because the author definitely purposefully used this imagery to show that women have to hide from society. Women feel as though they are constantly having a wall up for society and not being able to express themselves thoroughly. Mental health has never been a topic covered in women’s literature before this point, which makes sense because mental health is a more recent topic in general. 

After reading Why I Wrote the Yellow Wallpaper, I thought that the last line stood out to me and was a good way to leave off the piece. She stated, “It was not intended to drive people crazy, but to save people from being driven crazy, and it worked.” I thought this was a good way to end the explanation because it is true; it is important for people to be educated on mental health and be aware in order to not only prevent other people from falling into bad mental health, but also to keep yourself out of bad mental states. I think it is important that this piece was published and that people read and discussed it because in this time in history, mental health wasn’t discussed very frequently. I am sure that women had been going through mental health issues beforehand, but it was just now being brought to the attention of people. 


Stetson, Charlotte. The Yellow Wall-Paper. 

Comments

  1. Caroline HersheyApril 26, 2021 at 11:16 AM

    The summary was done nicely. I think that it is very influential to read a piece that was the first to talk about mental health, and especially a woman doing it because I think men sometimes have this tough front on where they cant be the ones to talk about it. So to have a female doing writings like this to bring so much awareness to a hard subject is refreshing, especially when it is done in a creative way.

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