Research Paper Final Copy

Alexia Brooks

Professor DeVries

English 3150

1 December 2009

 

The Rest Cure and Feminist Theory in The Yellow Wallpaper

For centuries, women have been thought to be irrational creatures who allow their emotions to guide them through life, never using their intellect and thus, never being able to think logically.  Men thought women had no capacity to clearly understand reality and therefore their feelings were invalid.  Women really started to take back their voices through the use of feminist theory in early American literature. The literature illustrated stories of women in very realistic but also very oppressed ways, overcoming the devastating loss of their self to achieve freedom from the confines of societal expectations.  One of the most important pieces of early American feminist thought was a short story called The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman.  The short story was influenced by Gilman’s own personal experiences with post partum depression and her struggles against her doctor’s false diagnosis.  She was put on a type of rehabilitation called rest cure, which was a type of prescription where the patient, usually a woman, is bound to her home and denied intellectual stimulation. The narrator in The Yellow Wallpaper is also subjected to this cure by her doctor husband, John. It was a brief but important commentary on women’s health and emotions during a time when women were thought to be weak creatures.  In this essay, I will talk about the psychosis and depression the narrator went through because of the rest cure that was implemented for her depression and how this relates to the feminist theory.

In the beginning of The Yellow Wallpaper, the reader is introduced to an unnamed narrator through her first person account of her psychological oppression by her husband, John. Gilman purposefully did not give the narrator a name in this story because it was her way of depicting society’s stereotype that all women were the same and were not in fact separate entities who each had unique emotions. The narrator and her husband have moved to a mansion for the summer, where the narrator is put in a prison type room that has bars on the windows, a bed nailed to the floor, and scattered bits of yellow wallpaper that she is repulsed by.  The room used to be a nursery, but now it has been turned into a rehabilitation area for the narrator to begin her recommended treatment, the rest cure. The rest cure was an actual treatment given to the author, Gilman, after the birth of her child and her slip into depression. It was created by Silas Weir Mitchell and part of the reason why Gilman wrote The Yellow Wallpaper.  Mitchell ordered Gilman to live as domestic a life as possible and to have only two hours of intellectual life a day, “never touching a pen, brush, or pencil again” for as long as she lived (Gilman).    According to “The Rest Cure Revisited” by Diana Martin, M.D., Mitchell felt that, “‘healthy’ for women included strict limits on ‘brain work,’ which he felt imposed nervous strain and might interfere with ‘womanly duties’” (Martin, par. 2).  Mitchell felt that psychological manipulation and the need to keep the patient in a childlike submission was crucial to the rest cure’s ability to show results, which is what John, the narrator’s husband in the story did.  John is Gilman’s representation of her real life physician, Mitchell (Martin par. 3). The narrator begins to slip into a mental break, due to her lack of interaction with the outside world.  Gilman also mentions in an article called “Why I wrote ‘The Yellow Wallpaper,” that due to the rest cure, she almost had a complete mental ruin (Gilman).  Unlike the narrator, Gilman learned that the rest cure was futile to her condition, which she also discovered was caused by post partum depression, and was able to escape before she became insane.

The rest cure is a very interesting rehabilitation technique because it relies on the imprisonment of a young woman to treat a mental disease most often times associated with hysteria.  The rest cure’s main technique for treatment is isolation, bed rest, dieting and massage. The narrator in The Yellow Wallpaper is not allowed to leave her room; her husband goes to such lengths as to put a locked gate that blocks the access to the stairs to keep her confined to her room.  He treats her as if she is a child and even refers to her as a little girl. When she gets out of bed one night to go and touch the wallpaper in her room, he awakens and asks her, “What is it, little girl?” Don’t go walking about like that-you’ll get cold” (Gilman 23). When she tells him that she is not benefiting from her detainment and wishes she could be taken away, he brushes off her feelings, promoting the idea, once again, that women cannot be trusted to accurately describe their feelings. She suggests that she should be out of her room, interacting with people and learn to be a mother to her son and John tells her that she is getting much better due to the rest cure. The narrator explains that she is only getting worse from the segregation.   John does not even give her the respect of talking directly to her when she addresses her case, saying, “Bless her little heart! She shall be as sick as she pleases!” (Gilman 24). He believes her condition has rendered her unable to think and function for herself and thus he believes he must watch over her and control her as one does with a child.   She begins to get very frustrated, but initially, she does not know where to direct her anger. She believes her husband loves her and just wants what is best for her, so she begins to express her anger towards the yellow wallpaper for being the decoration of her imprisonment.  Her frustration and fascination with the yellow wallpaper begins to pull her away from her actuality.

It is theorized that the narrator of this story experienced psychosis, which is defined by Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary as “a loss of contact with reality” (Merriam-Webster).  It is insinuated in the text that the woman’s psychosis may be due  in large part to post partum depression because she has recently given birth to a child that she explains makes her nervous to be around (Gilman14). Post partum depression can cause a person to have a mental break, not unlike the one that the narrator begins to experience through her stay in this room.  She starts off by having a small fascination with the wallpaper, saying,

“I lie here on this great immovable bed-it is nailed down, I believe-and follow that pattern about the hour. It is as good as gymnastics, I assure you. I start, we’ll say, at the bottom, down in the corner over there where it has not been touched, and I determine for the thousandth time that I will follow that pointless pattern to some sort of conclusion” (Gilman 19).

She describes how the longer she stays in the room, the more the wallpaper transforms, especially at night.  She begins to see a woman in the wallpaper, who she doesn’t know at first, is herself, which is a metaphor for the way she feels being stuck in this room without a companion or a creative task to entertain herself.  She notes that “The faint figure behind [the wallpaper] seemed to shake the pattern, just as if she wanted to get out” (Gilman 23). The narrator becomes enthralled with the woman in the wallpaper and angry that she cannot grab a hold of her because the woman always moves whenever the narrator moves.  She starts to obsess over the hatred of the room because of the yellow wallpaper and the woman that she sees creeping around behind the pattern, trying desperately to escape the bars from the shadows.  The delusions that she is suffering from are manifestations of her own imprisonment. The woman she sees in the wall is none other than herself and the bars that the woman is behind are a representation of the confinement that her husband has put her in.   She decides that she must free the woman in the wallpaper and begins to strip the remaining pieces off of the wall. She realizes that she has come out of the wallpaper once the wallpaper has been torn down. It is her tangible source for imprisonment and she has just broken free of it.  When her husband unlocks the door to see that she has pulled off the wallpaper, she replies, “I’ve got it at last, in spite of you and Jane. And I’ve pulled off most of the paper, so you can’t put me back!” (Gilman 36). Her husband faints in her path and she creeps over him, just like the woman she saw in the wallpaper.

Feminism is described as the theory of the political, economic, and social equality of the sexes.  In bell hooks’ book called Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center, she says, “Contemporary feminist movement in the United States called attention to the exploitation and oppression of women globally” (hooks 34).   It is undeniable that The Yellow Wallpaper is a feminist piece. Charlotte Perkins Gilman, herself, was famous feminist lecturer and writer and her story has been acclaimed as a literary masterpiece for what it stood for in regards to feminist thinking.  With the expansion of the feminist movement, The Yellow Wallpaper was revived.  New age feminists thought the story showed the masculine assertion of power in the nineteenth century of medical professions.  Elaine R. Hedges, an English professor at Towson State University, Maryland, also wrote pieces for the Feminist Press. Professor Hedges writes in her afterword of The Yellow Wallpaper, “For aside from the light it throws on the personal despairs, and the artistic triumph over them, of one of America’s foremost feminists, the story is one of the rare pieces of literature we have by a nineteenth-century woman which directly confronts the sexual politics of the male-female, husband-wife relationship” (Gilman 39).  The story created a new sphere for women to write about their mistreatments by men.  Hedges describes Gilman’s work as a feminist document that deals with sexual politics during a time when there were not very many writers who felt comfortable doing so.  The narrator in The Yellow Wallpaper has been cast aside as an absurd woman who is unable to function without the help from a male doctor.  The male in this story is oppressing her very nature by keeping her locked away in a room, isolated from society and her child. She was not crazy until she went into the room; the rest cure is what made her lose touch with reality.  When the narrator was in confinement, she was not allowed to read or write, even though she snuck her diary when her husband wasn’t around. This was when she began to read the patterns of the wallpaper, thus finding her escape. Every detail of this story is covered in the subjugation of women’s thoughts and feelings.  The fact that she rises above her husband’s control over her life makes this a feminist text.    When Gilman describes John’s sister, Jennie, the housekeeper, she says, “She is a perfect and enthusiastic housekeeper, and hopes for no better profession” (Gilman 17-8).  Gilman is in no way promoting these ideas of women being the lesser sex, she is merely pointing out that these were the ways women were conditioned to think and feel towards one another and their husbands.  She knew the ways in which women were portrayed in her time (and even today on a much smaller scale) and wanted to capitalize on that idea through this story. She wanted to teach women to stand up for themselves and spoke of these feminist ideals in her book, Women and Economics.

Elaine Hedges compares the narrator in The Yellow Wallpaper to Gilman’s real life experience with the rest cure and her nearly permanent slip into psychosis, stating, “The heroine in ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’ is destroyed…She has tried, in defiance of all social and medical codes of her time, to retain her sanity and her individuality. But the odds are against her and she fails. Charlotte Perkins Gilman did not fail” (Hedges 55).  While it is true that the narrator did go crazy, one may not be so quick to think that she failed in her attempts to retain her individuality. She did end up pulling the wallpaper off the wall at the end of the story and freeing herself from the prison her husband had placed her in.   Once she walks over his passed out body, it is as if she has finally conquered her husband.  To say that she was not able to retain her individuality may be putting too high a standard on this woman. She has just been in isolation for several weeks and has emerged, no matter how flawed and cracked, from the yellow wallpaper.

Mitchell’s rest cure was a way to promote the idea that women’s thoughts and activities should be monitored and controlled. Even if he thought that he was truly helping his patients, his remedy further proved how unimportant the feelings of women were to men during that time.  This also demonstrates how afraid men were of women’s ever growing sentiments and deliberations because if they were able to think and feel freely, they may choose to rebel against the expectations that were set for them.  The rest cure further shows that the treatment was not for the women as much as it was implemented so the men could maintain their power.  Gilman’s response to the rest cure, which was her successful attempt to pull herself back into reality and write The Yellow Wallpaper, was a way to promote feminist theory.  She wanted to show that the “same world exists for women as for men,” (Gilman 57) which is why she wrote the story along with many other articles.  Gilman’s bravery and persistence to come out of her depression and write a story that is still relevant in today’s society has given women throughout the past three centuries a voice and a belief in themselves.

Within The Yellow Wallpaper, there were elements of feminism that have been carried on throughout the years.  It was a tragic pit stop in the history of women that will hopefully never be repeated.  The rest cure, while it was not and has not ever been a wide spread form of restoration, acted as the inspiration for this particular feminist literary piece.  The implementation of the rest cure as a form of rehabilitation was the complete imprisonment of women.  It operated as a way for men to maintain their control over a woman’s every move by preying on her sanity and disguising their manipulation as concern for the woman’s well being.   The room with the yellow wallpaper was essentially Gilman’s way of portraying a prison, disguised to be a safe haven. The feminist theory is applied throughout the story. First, the reader is introduced to the asphyxiation that is the narrator’s life, then the narrator becomes enthralled with the design of her prison and in turn becomes violent when she can’t escape the pattern.  Lastly, she breaks free, not of her mind, but of the chokehold that the wallpaper has kept her in, thus releasing her from John’s influence.  Her mental break was her only escape.  It is sad to see that the only way for a woman to break free of domestic hell was insanity. Even though Gilman got out of her detainment mentally sound, the narrator in the story did not.  Women were, for so long, overlooked, and thought to be meaningless human beings, only put on this earth to satisfy men.  They did not have a voice until the feminist movement came along and gave them one.  All of the outrage that I feel is somehow overpowered by all of my gratitude for the feminist movement. Had it not been for them, who knows where women would be? Although we still have a long way to go in terms of the way society views us, we have definitely been heard.

 

Works Cited:

Gilman, Charlotte Perkins. The Yellow Wallpaper. New England: Small, Maynard, Boston, 1899.

Gilman, Charlotte Perkins. “Why I Wrote The Yellow Wallpaper.” Forerunner (1913): n. pag. Web. 18 Nov 2009. <http://www.library.csi.cuny.edu/dept/history/lavender/whyyw.html>.

hooks, bell. Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center. Massachusetts: South End Press, 1984.

Martin, Diane. “The Rest Cure Revisited.” American Journal of Psychiatry (2007): n. pag. Web.     18 Nov 2009. <http://ajp.psychiatryonline.org/cgi/content/full/164/5/737>.

Pearce, J. “Silas Weir Mitchell and the “rest cure.”.” J Neurol Neurosurg Psychiatry 75. (2004): 381. Web. 23 Nov 2009. <http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1738960/pdf/v075p00381.pdf>.

 

 

Advertisement