Now that I have thoroughly studied “The Yellow Wallpaper,” lastly I will turn attention to Gilman’s incentive for writing the story. Initially, “The Yellow Wallpaper” was read as a ghost story along with Edgar Allan Poe’s ghastly tales (Dock 18). The nineteenth century audience did not allow other interpretations and neglected it as “a feminist document” (Dock 18). In fact, Gilman had trouble publishing “The Yellow Wallpaper” because it was deviated from accepted standards for women’s fiction (Meyering 5). Some reviewers declared “The Yellow Wallpaper,” “a book to keep away from the young wife” for the “story is calculated to prevent girls from marrying” (“Books” 9). Though Poe was able to publish his stories about mental breakdown, such as “The Black Cat” in 1843, and “The Fall of the House of Usher” in 1839, female writers were not allowed to overstep their bounds. Despite the rejections from publishers and bad reviews, Gilman did not give up sending her message to the public.
In Gilman’s autobiography, she writes:
The real purpose of the story was to reach Dr. S. Weir Mitchell, and convince him of the error of his ways. I sent him a copy as soon as it came out, but got no response. However, many years later, I met some one who knew close friends of Dr. Mitchell’s who said he had told them that he had changed his treatment of nervous prostration since reading “The Yellow Wallpaper.” If that is a fact, I have not lived in vain. (Living 121)
To Gilman, the “rest cure therapy” was the enemy. It took every human right from women and debased them. Shulman writes, “Underlying the Mitchell rest cure is the assumption that women are intellectually inferior to men” (viii). Not only did the treatment deprive women of their freedom, it made problems worse, driving Gilman to the edge of lunacy.
Gilman thought that there are much better ways to treat women’s mental sicknesses. In 1915, she published “Dr. Clair’s Place,”29 in which she works out alternatives to Mitchell’s rest cure (Shulman xxii). Some of the alternatives are music treatment, listening to music of one's own liking whenever one likes, color treatment, changing the color of the room with lights according to mood, and the odor and flavor test, experimenting with the connection between pleasant flavors and odors and state of mind (“Dr. Clair” 302). Later on, the narrator is prescribed heavy exercise whereby she becomes much stronger bodily and mentally. The proposition of this story is that the greatest cure of all for depression is to keep busy with work and interests of ones own.
Elaine Hedges suggests the audience for whom the “The Yellow Wallpaper” was written:
Women writers, of the crippling social pressures imposed on women in the nineteenth century and the sufferings they thereby endured: women who could not attend college although their brothers could; women expected to devote themselves, their lives, to aging and ailing parents; women treated as toys or as children and experiencing who is to say how much loss of self-confidence as a result. It is to the entire class of defeated, or even destroyed women, to this large body of wasted, or semi-wasted talent, that “The Yellow Wallpaper” is addressed. (132)
Gilman stated that she did not intend to write this novella “to drive people crazy, but to save people from being driven crazy” ("Why I Wrote" 332). Though the ending of the story is quite horrific, she wanted to show that it is the consequence of the wife’s suppression. Gilman wanted to spread the awareness that when women are removed from all responsibility and are taken care of like a child by their husbands, they are in danger of being driven into insanity.