DNP 703 Module 3 Critical Analysis Essay Example

The Patient Who Was Not Heard: A Critical Analysis of Gilman's "The Yellow Wall-Paper"

Student Name

Edson College of Nursing and Health Innovation, Arizona State University

DNP 703: Innovation in Communication: Scholarly and Professional Writing

Instructor Name

Month Day, Year

The Patient Who Was Not Heard: A Critical Analysis of Gilman's "The Yellow Wall-Paper"

Introduction

"The Yellow Wall-Paper" is narrated by a woman whose physician husband prescribes rest, isolation and a ban on writing after the birth of her child (Gilman, 1892). Over the course of the story, she becomes absorbed in the wallpaper of her room and finally loses touch with reality. The story is usually read as a protest against the treatment of women. I argue that it is also a precise portrait of a clinical relationship in which the patient's own account is treated as a symptom rather than as evidence, and that its form, a secret journal, makes the reader the listener the narrator never had.

The Voice No One Hears

The narrator's journal is full of observations her husband dismisses. She tells him she is not getting better, and he answers that she is, and that he is the doctor. Her doubts are framed in apologetic phrases, as if she expects to be corrected. The effect is that the reader hears what the husband refuses to: a patient describing her own decline accurately while being told she is wrong. The story shows that silencing need not be cruel; the husband is affectionate and sure of his care.

The Room as Treatment

The room itself is part of the prescription. It has barred windows and a bed fixed to the floor, and the narrator is kept there because the husband believes it is best for her. The wallpaper, which she first hates and then studies obsessively, becomes the only outlet for a mind denied work and company. Read clinically, the room shows what happens when a treatment is designed without the patient: it removes the activities she says help her and replaces them with an environment she says harms her.

The Rest Cure and Its Certainty

The treatment in the story echoes the rest cure that physicians prescribed to women in Gilman's time, which required inactivity and forbade intellectual work. The husband never questions it. His certainty, not his malice, drives the tragedy. The story's ending, in which the narrator creeps around the room and the husband faints, reverses their positions: the confident clinician collapses, and the patient, at last, cannot be ignored.

A Competing Reading

Some readers see the story chiefly as a tale of madness or of the supernatural, with the wallpaper as a haunting. That reading explains the story's dread but not its details: the repeated dismissals, the banned writing, the husband's professional authority. Those details point to a social cause, not a ghost.

Lessons for Nursing

Charon (2001) argues that clinicians need narrative competence, the ability to absorb, interpret and be moved by patients' stories. Gilman's narrator offers exactly the story her husband needed to hear. For nurses, the lesson is that the patient's account is data. When a patient says a treatment is making her worse, the first response should be curiosity, not reassurance. Carper (1978) would call this personal and esthetic knowing: meeting the patient as a person and perceiving what matters to her.

Conclusion

"The Yellow Wall-Paper" endures because its central failure is still possible: a caring clinician, sure of the right treatment, who does not listen. The journal form lets readers do what the husband would not. Reading it critically is practice for listening better.

References

Carper, B. A. (1978). Fundamental patterns of knowing in nursing. Advances in Nursing Science, 1(1), 13-24. https://doi.org/10.1097/00012272-197810000-00004

Charon, R. (2001). Narrative medicine: A model for empathy, reflection, profession, and trust. JAMA, 286(15), 1897-1902. https://doi.org/10.1001/jama.286.15.1897

Gilman, C. P. (1892). The yellow wall-paper. The New England Magazine, 11(5), 647-656.