Throughout the short story The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, we see a woman crippled by depression and mental illness. We see how the narrator and John interact as husband and wife and as doctor and patient. On the surface, it seems like John is a good-hearted man who wants what's best for his wife and is willing to do whatever it takes to make her better again. But as the reader looks closer and the story progresses, John becomes more of a liability to his wife than the illness itself. Gilman uses John's criticism of Charlotte to describe gender roles, professional and medial, in the 19th century. She uses this parallelism to break down the oppression of patriarchal society on women and the idea that women's only role is in the home. John is an authoritarian man, believing he knows everything that is good for his wife. The narrator says that she “has a prescribed schedule for each hour of the day; he takes care of me,” which shows that John is controlling her every minute. He sets a time for her rest, her exercise, when she will eat, when she will be able to read; he plans everything for her (Gilman 4). This total control parallels the male population's idea that women of the time could not make simple, sound decisions for themselves. Gilman takes John's schedule for Charlotte and uses it to represent men's desire to control women in order to help them overcome their mental fragility. Men of the time mistakenly believed that women were incapable of performing simple daily tasks. John believed that his precise schedule for his wife would eliminate any unnecessary stress by planning his every move for her. This strict timeline shows her slow suppression of the life choices imposed by her husband...... middle of paper ...... treatment of mental illnesses and that their methods of treatment and healing were ineffective and often detrimental to their patients. It shows Charlotte as a victim of the male idea that women were neither competent nor capable. This piece shows the power of diagnosis and the empowerment of the male doctor's voice and how he took over and weakened the female patient's opinion and thoughts about her own treatment and life choices. Works CitedYILDIRIM, Aşkın Haluk. “The Woman Question and Victorian Gender Literature.” Academic Review Ekev 16.52 (2012): 45-54. Academic research completed. Internet. May 14, 2014. Welter, Barbara. “The cult of true femininity: 1820-1860. » The American family in social historical perspective. Ed. Michael Gordon. New York: St. Martin's P, 1978. 373-392. Gilman, Charlotte Perkins. Yellow wallpaper. New York: Feminist, 1973. Web.