“The Yellow Wallpaper” is a gem of a story when it comes to leaving the reader in sense of despair and confusion. What really happened to the narrator? What could have caused her to have “nervous depression” in the first place? These questions came to my mind as I stared at the last page.

After listening to the discussion in class over “The Yellow Wallpaper”, I began to wonder about the possible ailments, physical and mental, that the narrator may have been suffering. I researched on the internet after consulting the text and rereading certain passages. The first page I was compelled to look at was WebMD.com.

The discussion in class brought up a very reasonable assumption as to the narrator’s conditions: lead poisoning. Due to the fact that the story is based around the time of the late 19th century, it is not an outrageous assumption. Lead could have been present in the house.

After researching possible venues of lead, I came across some interesting facts. Lead could have been present in furniture finishes. Which means that the floor, the bed, dressers, tables, just about everything could have been covered in it. Also, and the most major instance would have to be lead paint. It is noted several times that the narrator thought the house had a stuffy smell, and it would get worse when the windows would be shut on rainy days. I can just picture the lead building up inside of her, poisoning her body and mind.

Another ailment that might have plagued her was depression. This is actually an obvious assumption, seeming how it is almost a theme in the story. According to The Cleveland Clinic, women are twice as likely to have depression than men and ten to twenty-five percent of women have had it at some point in their lives. Some of the viable causes of depression that the narrator have are pregnancy, loss of social support, and relationship stress.

The loss of social support is very apparent in the narrator’s case. She seems to have no friends or family with her to understand her and to keep her busy and happy. Even her husband seems to be closed to her, shoving her opinions aside like a child’s. I think that if she had someone to keep her entertained and talk to, she would have been much better off.

Triggered by depression, she could also be affected by insomnia. This actually seems to be the case. She has a hard time sleeping and is tired during the day. This may have been triggered by a change in her sleep environment (staying at the estate).

Another cause of her mental state could be mania. She has a decreased need for sleep. She also has racing thoughts and is easily distracted by unimportant things, like the wallpaper, for instance.

A viral infection could also be the cause of her disorder. It is unlikely, but a possibility, that the narrator had mononucleosis. Symptoms of mono are depression, loss of energy, and loss of appetite. If this is true, her treatment would have differed from the one she was receiving. In either case, her treatment was wrong and only worsened her condition.

If age were a factor in this, which I’m not sure if that is the case, we could assume that she is going through menopause. The change in hormones causes many women to go into depression. Common ways to treat these symptoms are to have a creative outlet (her writing) and to nurture her relationships. Both of these things were forbidden to her.

The chronic symptoms of her illness are not clear to us, the readers, because we are only given information for a short amount of time. It is unclear to know what happened before her trip to the estate, or to know what her condition was following the end of the story.

Naturally, to understand the story, one must have an understanding of the author. In this case, I thought that maybe if I knew what might have plagued the author I might know what plagued the narrator. My answer came in an article of the October 1913 issue of The Forerunner. If you have not read it yet, I encourage you to. So many of my questions were answered in this article by Gilman herself.

In it, she admits to suffering from depression, or melancholia as it was known as in the 19th century. The husband of the narrator represented Gilman’s doctor, a man who told her to not socialize, to never write again, and to live as domestic as possible. Within three months time, this treatment almost drove her completely insane.

This literature not only sheds light on the workings of mental illness but also on the treatment of women at the time. Although women have been the glowing center of many works of poetry and stories, they were not so highly regarded in the real world.

The story “was not intended to drive people crazy, but to save people from being driven crazy, and it worked” Gilman stated in her article. It is clear now, to me, what she intended the narrator to be plagued with. However, it is up to the reader to take what they think is important out of this first person narrative.