Charlotte Perkins Gilman, during her first marriage to Charles Stetson, struggled with depression. Her marriage lasted only ten short years as a severe nervous disorder rocked his ideal picture of their life together. Undergoing various treatments from prestigious male physicians, her medicine was mostly restricted to bed rest–no work, no visitors, just simply to lay in bed and rest. More often than not, these very physicians refused to diagnose her with any sort of illness, reassuring her that there was nothing wrong with her, claiming that she was simply too stressed or too worrisome. Gilman looked healthy, looked how they thought a healthy woman should look, so therefore a mental diagnosis was unnecessary to the medicinal world, a world driven by the opinions and outlooks of men. It was during this afflicted period of her life, in which she wrote "The Yellow Wallpaper," a short story about the treatment of mentally ill women, much to the protest of her male readers. Extrapolated from her own experience with depression, Gilman wrote "The Yellow Wallpaper" as a means of bringing awareness to the mistreatment of women with serious mental issues, that if treated wrongly, could escalate into even more serious and complicated ones. "It was not intended to drive people crazy," Gilman assures her readers in 1913, "but to save people from being driven crazy, and it worked" (Yellow 10). In her story, she writes of an unnamed narrator and her husband, John, and of the three months they spent in a vacation house far from the stresses and cares of city life. This seclusion, the retreat to the open, airy country house, was for the sole purpose of curing the narrator of her "temporary nervous depression–[her] slight hysterical tendency" (Yellow 1). Leisure as a cure was a convention in the late 1800s and early 1900s, a time when psychiatry and neuroscience were primitive and women's rights, especially those dealing with equal and fair medical treatment, had barely begun to enter the conversation.
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