The story is a narrative, which may have included no genuine dialogue at all, if the author had wanted it; However, the story presents actual dialogue on three separate occasions, and relates several other conversations. Since there was dialogue, I expected it to be interesting, and move the story along. The conversations is almost entirely mundane and oft superfluous, where characters repeat facts and opinions that the narrator has already explained. If this is way the author intends to utilize dialogue, perhaps she ought not use it at all.
Charlotte Perkins Gilman never avails herself of a direct strike against the rest cure. Throughout the story it is clear that the narrator is not improving under the rest cure, but her health is not failing because of it-the responsibility for that is ascribed to bad wallpaper. There are numerous approaches the author could have taken to make a criticism on the rest cure. Gilman could have used dialogue to express criticism; she could have written a disagreement, perhaps even an argument, between the Narrator and her husband where she expresses her lack of faith in the rest cure, and why she feels that way, and John refuses to hear her concerns. Instead, we are given the bedroom scene (lines 133-143) where the narrator only says that she does not believe the cure to be working, and John rebuffs her. In that scene, an opportunity to write a genuine criticism was available, but it was not seized. At the very least, the author could have written that the rest cure was to blame for the narrator�s madness, but Gilman never makes such a statement.
The story is not helped in any measure by it�s lack of direction. Gilman meant for her story to be a criticism, yet it is split between a horror story about insanity, and the examination of the relation of the Narrator and her husband. A criticism of the rest cure should focus on the patient who is undergoing the rest cure, the nature of her illness, and the administration of the rest cure itself. The elements which garner the most attention in "The Yellow Wallpaper" are the patient�s surroundings and her relation with John and Jennie.
Worse, even, than the story�s lack of direction is it�s misdirection. If Charlotte Perkins Gilman meant to say that the rest cure caused insanity, then she is wrong. In the same way you can�t die from not using the bathroom, you can�t go insane from three months of incarceration. I describe the rest cure as incarceration because, I believe, they are fairly similar; a long period of seclusion coupled with little activity. While I respect it as a bold stroke to imply that the rest cure causes insanity, the intent of that implication is muddied because it is not clear, in "The Yellow Wallpaper" that the rest cure is the cause of the Narrator�s madness. The story associates the wallpaper in the Narrator�s room closer with her failing health than it does the rest cure by leaps and bounds: As the narrator focuses more and more on her wallpaper, her sanity fails more and more. The story should have associated the Narrator�s madness with the rest cure directly, to make clear that it is the cure that drives her mad. To give an example, there ought to have been a section of the story where the Narrator is alone for a day and undertakes a variety of mentally and physically stimulating activities, whether they be reading a good book, the New York Times crossword puzzle, balancing her checkbook, doing a two mile run, or whatever you please. In the aftermath of these activities the Narrator would explain how much better she felt for having performed them, to elucidate that as the rest cure is ignored, the Narrator�s mental infirmity wanes. But, that does not happen.
Finally, the ending is poor and negative. The Narrator at last loses her grip on reality and goes insane, because of her wallpaper. I believe that Charlotte Perkins Gilman perhaps wanted to make her criticism more of a cautionary tale, and thus felt the ending had to reinforce that caution: Undertake the Rest Cure, and go crazy. But Gilman muddies her own point when ties the Narrator�s madness with the wallpaper. The more effective ending would have been one where the Narrator was brought to the edge of madness by the rest cure, and then by her own choice, demands to be taken off the cure, and taken back home, where she could engage in a more normal routine, with academic exercise and a healthy social life, which would result with her eventual recovery. In this ending, it would be possible to indict the rest cure as maddening, and then demonstrate that a healthy regimen of mental exercise was a superior treatment for nervous depression.
There is a possibility that I have misunderstood Charlotte Perkins Gilman�s approach to her story. Perhaps she wished to convey a woman�s descent into madness while under the rest cure in a strictly realistic narrative, where the rest cure was not openly questioned by the patient, or her doctor and husband. Where the patient herself falls into a schizophrenic state and focuses her attention-and ours, for it is the patient�s narrative-to her wallpaper, believing from hallucinations that there is a woman behind the walls of her room. Perhaps this is how the author thought it best to approach the rest cure in a cautionary tale. However, whether that is what she felt or not, her final product was not the critical examination it could have been.
