Women's Oppression Exposed in the Yellow Wallpaper Charlotte Perkins Gilman is remembered today primarily for her feminist work "The Yellow Wallpaper." He dramatizes his life and experience with Dr. S. Weir Mitchell's now infamous "rest cure." Commonly prescribed to women suffering from “hysteria,” the rest cure entirely prohibited companionship, art, writing, or any other form of intellectual stimulation. When Mitchell prescribed it to Gilman, he told her to "'live a domestic life as much as possible,' to 'have only two hours of intellectual life a day,' and to 'never touch pen, brush, or pencil again' as long as I lived ” (“Why I wrote… np). He only began to recover when he returned to his art and writing, and subsequently wrote “The Yellow Wallpaper” to warn others of the dangers of its attempt to stifle creativity It raises the question, stated by Conrad Shumaker, “What happens to the imagination when it is defined as feminine (and therefore weak) and is faced with a society that values ​​the useful, the practical and rejects anything else. such a thing as nonsense?" (590). The answer given by Gilman is that it becomes uncontrollable and has the potential to destroy a person's sanity. In "The Yellow Wallpaper", the narrator suffers from postpartum depression, diagnosed by her husband John as "hysteria". He advises them to take care of rest and arranges for them to spend the summer in a country villa. Although his wife wants to get a room downstairs that opens onto the garden, John forces her to live upstairs in a nursery with barred windows and hideous yellow wallpaper. She is not allowed to write, except for a diary she keeps secretly, a... medium of paper... William Day and Sandra Waller. New York: Addison Wesley Longman, 1997. 299-312. “Why I Wrote 'The Yellow Wallpaper'.” The Forerunner, October 1913: npGolden, Catherine. “The Writing of 'The Yellow Wallpaper': A Double Palimpsest.” Studies in American Fiction 17 (1989): 198-201. Johnson, Greg. "Gilman's Gothic Allegory: Anger and Redemption in 'The Yellow Wallpaper'". Studies in Short Fiction 26 (1989): 521-30.Kasmer, Lisa "Charlotte Perkins Gilman's 'The Yellow Wallpaper': A Symptomatic Reading." Literature and Psychology 36.3 (1990): 1-15.MacPike, Loralee. "The Environment as Psychopathological Symbolism in 'The Yellow Wallpaper'." American Literary Realism 8 (1975): 286-88. Shumaker, Conrad. "Too Terribly Beautiful to Print: 'The Yellow Wallpaper' by Charlotte Perkins Gilman." American literature 57 (1985): 588-99.