Klausner, Lewis SamuelGrego, AlessandraBiada, Beatrice2024-05-312024-05-312021Biada, Beatrice. "Painful Disclosure: Women Writing About Mental Illness". BA Thesis, John Cabot University, Rome, Italy. 2021.https://hdl.handle.net/20.500.14490/85Thesis (B.A. in English Literature, Minor in Communications)--John Cabot University, Spring 2021.Charlotte Perkins Gilman's "The Yellow Wallpaper" initiated a genre of literature in which women writers use fiction as a means of telling their own stories of mental illness. Various as mental illnesses may be, the literature of this genre shows a good deal of commonality from one work to another. These works reinforce each other in telling a story in which women's illness is specifically female and connected to the vocations available or unavailable to women. They also narrate of a medical profession dominated by men, in which female patients' complaints are not listened to or taken seriously. This essay will look at three works that are prominent in this genre: Charlotte Perkins Gilman's "The Yellow Wallpaper" (1892), Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway (1925), and Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar (1963). What is most interesting from a literary point of view is how these authors transform their stories into works of fiction.iii, 42 pagesenAttribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 Internationalhttp://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/Mental illnessWritings of the mentally illWomen and literatureThesis