Improving by the Hour

As if to make up for the disaster that was my last attempt at timed writing for this piece, my process went so smoothly today!  I was really happy with how far I got.  Instead of looking at it as a monster paper that makes me want to hide under my bed, I broke it into bits.  Each point got its own Word Doc and I was able to stitch them together at the end of today.  Now, I just need to do the intro and conclusion and I'll have a pretty decent draft of this guy!

Here's what I've come up with:

Introducing the Work

“The Yellow Wallpaper,” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, tells the story of a young woman who is brought to an isolated, Gothic house by her husband, John, after the birth of their child.  The woman is unnamed, which suggests the universality of her predicament and the idea that she could refer to any female of the time period.  The narrator sees herself as sick, but only temporarily.  John, on the other hand, deems her “temporary nervous depression—a slight hysterical tendency” as meriting a more drastic rest cure.  The narrator/patient is placed in solitary confinement in her room for an undetermined amount of time.  The bed is bolted to the floor, the windows are barred, and a hideous yellow paper covers the walls.  The narrator is forbidden to write, although she believes it would help her condition, so she does so by keeping a secret diary in which she records her feelings, thoughts, opinions, and later delusions.  The story then goes on to detail the narrator’s descent into insanity.  She feels she must hide her condition from her husband and displays only the behavior he wants to see; when he is around, she eats and rests often, so he believes that she’s improving.

 However, this belies the insanity that has taken hold of her mind as she obsesses over the yellow wallpaper in the room.  She begins to imagine a woman trapped inside the paper.  She follows her movements during the day and tears the paper off in strips in an attempt to free the woman. ‘The front pattern does move—and no wonder! The woman behind shakes it!”(insert pg number) The narrator identifies with the woman in the wallpaper and readers can interpret this as the resentment she feels towards filling the role of insanity expected of her.  Her husband treats her as if she were mad and she lives up to his expectations.  The story ends with John discovering his poor bride creeping around the room on all fours and she triumphantly exclaims the following: “’I’ve got out at last,’ said I, “in spite of you and Jennie. And I’ve pulled off most of the paper, so you can’t put me back!” With this, John is forced to deal with the monster he’s created.

Comparison to the Author’s Life

            For author Charlotte Perkins Gilman, this story was all-too personal.  The work was written after Charlotte herself dealt with mental issues that were brought on by family life, misdiagnosed, and mistreated.  She was a bright mind in her youth, having received a college education after countless arguments with her parents over whether it was fitting for a young woman.  Charlotte never wanted the “housewife” role suggested for most women of her day. 

At times she saw herself as engaged in a tragic tug-of-war between “The World and The Woman”—and the best she could hope for was an uneasy truce. At times, she felt immersed in the larger world; at other times, she felt imprisoned in her flesh, achingly aware of every bump, bruise, and boundary. (insert citation)

            Charlotte longed to make a difference in the world.  In her biography, she discusses how she wished to live life to its maximum potential and do a vast amount of good there.  She saw the role of a wife and mother as intellectually crippling, but because of the societal opinions of the day, her options were limited.  This would lead her to take on a feminist voice later in life. Before that, however, Charlotte opted to try out the marriage and family route.  It was there that she discovered the stigma of mental instability that is so quickly assigned to women in times of struggle.

            Charlotte based the main character of “The Yellow Wallpaper” on her own experience with family life.  She married a man for whom she had some affection, despite her vows to remain single all her life, and was soon with child.  It was then that she began to be afflicted with what would now be classified as post-partum depression. 

Two years after the delivery, she recalled her physical labor as “easy . . . enough” but identified mental anguish as her downfall: “Had terrible fits of remorse and depression all through the time, but thought nothing of them as I had had the same in the two years torture called courtship. Began to show ‘nervousness’ in the month’s confinement. Had wild and dreadful ideas which I was powerless to check, times of excitement and times of tears.” (insert citation)

            Her experience mirrors that of the narrator in the story.  Instead of diagnosing the problem as a mental illness that could be overcome with proper treatment, doctors of those days were quick to label her issues as “neurasthenia…an umbrella category including within it mood disorders” (insert citation).  Along with that, “nervous women were often also or exclusively diagnosed with hysteria” (insert citation).  Her case wasn’t helped by the fact that another popular belief circulated that “Women’s purportedly voracious reproductive organs were thus portrayed as drawing energy from other areas of the body and especially from the mind” (insert citation). Like the narrator, Gilman’s illness was misdiagnosed due to incorrect and sexist beliefs of the day. Instead of receiving proper corrective treatment, both women were subject to crippling bedrest that worsened the disease.

            Luckily, Charlotte Perkins Gilman escaped from the insanity that ultimately befalls the narrator in “The Yellow Wallpaper.”  After doctors deemed her ready to re-enter society, she wrote the work as one of the first pieces of feminist literature. While one of the main themes in the story is definitely the oppressive nature of marriage, the message of assumed insanity based on sex is one that cannot be ignored.

Other Literary Comparisons

By studying more about the theme of insanity projected upon women, readers will discover that Charlotte Perkins Gilman was not the only author of her time to explore the topic.  One of her contemporaries, Susan Glaspell, wrote the well-known short story, “Trifles,” dealing with similar issues.  In this work, two women go to the scene of a murder with their husbands, who both work in law enforcement.  Their mutual friend, Mrs. Wright, is accused of killing her own husband and is sent to jail while the couples investigate her home.  The men in the story believe Mrs. Wright to be guilty and set out looking for proof that will convict her, but are prejudiced because they think she’s simply lost her mind.  They leave their wives to attend to trivial matters about the house.  While their husbands are gone, the women deduce how and why the crime was committed. However, because of their assumptions about Mrs. Wright’s mental state and their lack of regard for the intelligence of their wives, the law enforcement officers fail to convict Mrs. Wright and cannot solve the crime.

This story is another example of the fallacious reasoning that gripped society about the female state of mind.  If the men had listened to the opinions of their wives and not merely assumed Mrs. Wright had lost her mind, they would have been able to correctly convict the wrongdoer of the story.  In comparison to “The Yellow Wallpaper,” if John had assumed his wife to be logical and only temporarily suffering from an ailment, he could have helped her recover properly and saved her from real madness.  In both scenarios, a previously-held belief halted progress.  This relationship is a further witness to the projected insanity of women that was especially prevalent during the time period.

Gilman also follows a template characteristic of her era in order to reinforce this idea.  In (insert source info here), (this is where Shel find’s the author’s name…) states the following:

By placing his distraught wife in a nursery, he is merely following the nineteenth-century equation of non-maternal women—that is, spinsters and “hysterics”—with helpless children.  Yet he is unthinkingly allowing her the free play of imagination and abdication of social responsibility also characteristic of children.  Thus as the story progresses, the narrator follows both her childlike promptings and her artistic faith in creating a

Gothic alternative to the stifling daylight world of her husband and the society at large. (insert citation)

During this time, women who chose to follow non-traditional roles were thought of as incapable and unwell.  What else could be their reasoning for not wanting children?  By equating her narrator with a child in this way, Gilman is able to portray the immaturity assumed of women at that time period.  The narrator is portrayed as less intelligent and less rational than her husband in a childlike, under-developed manner.  When she has questions about her condition, John, the narrator’s husband, quickly dismisses them as shown in this passage: “’Bless her little heart!’ said he with a big hug, ‘she shall be as sick as she pleases! But now let’s improve the shining hours by going to sleep, and talk about it in the morning!’” (insert citation).  The narrator is deemed incapable of understanding her state and her suggestions are brushed off without hesitation. 

Mental Health Section

In regards to her treatment options, readers can see that the narrator has a much better notion of what would be best for her recovery than does her husband.  Her instincts, dismissed as lunatic and detrimental, are in fact rational and healthy.  The treatment she is prescribed, her “rest cure,” is defined as “a length of time during which the patient did minimal physical activity and had very limited mental stimulation because, as some doctors believed, the condition was brought on by too much going on in the patient’s mind or some kind of hysteria or nervousness” (insert citation).  Once again, assumed hysteria causes more damage than healing. 

The narrator herself shows another instance of her mental stability at the beginning of the story when she says: “Personally, I disagree with their ideas.  Personally, I believe that congenial work, with excitement and change, would do me good.  But what is one to do?” (insert source).  She is forced to comply with the then-accepted procedures of how to handle psychologically inept patients.  During this time, psychiatric facilities “were not institutions for treatment, but for the separation of mentally ill people from the community, and quality-wise resembled prisons. Treatment of mentally ill patents in psychiatric hospitals of that time was not founded on humane therapy” (insert source).  Due to the untested nature of psychiatry at the time, the narrator assumes that her doctors are right even though their methods are detrimental. Throughout the story, she longs to be able to engage in a form of self-therapy, her writing, but it is denied her time after time.  “I think sometimes if I were only well enough to write a little it would relieve the press of ideas and rest me” (insert citation).  Writing, a now-accepted form of creative expression and an effective method of psychological release, could have helped her recovery had not her ideas been discounted because of her insanity.