"The Yellow Wallpaper," the rest cure, and S. Weir Mitchell

This post contains spoilers about “The Yellow Wallpaper”

“The Yellow Wallpaper” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman is a short story about women, madness, and treatment in the late 1800’s. Since the author, herself, was under S. Weir Mitchell’s care and the rest cure, it is thought to be closely linked to her true experiences.

The nameless narrator, who some (myself included) believe is actually named Jane, goes with her husband, John, a physician, to a country house for the summer. She is essentially on the rest cure, which prohibits her from writing, reading, and doing much work at all. Her bedroom is a big room, which has hideous yellow wallpaper throughout it. She simultaneously begins focusing more and more on the wallpaper and losing her sanity. She begins to see a woman behind the wallpaper and many more outside “creeping.” At the end, she believes herself to be a woman who was hiding in the wallpaper and she creeps around the room as her husband passes out on the floor. (This is a very literal reading of the short story. Another reading I like is that the wallpaper is a domestic pattern (marriage, domesticity, etc.) of life out of which she wishes to break. She sees many other women who do not live within these domestic patterns, but they seem to try to hide this from others by “creeping.”)

“The Yellow Wallpaper” shows the ways in which women’s illnesses were treated in that time. I have actually read parts of S. Weir Mitchell’s “Fat and Blood: An Essay on the Treatment of Certain Forms of Neurasthenia and Hysteria.” According to this “essay” (although it seems much longer, like a book), the proper treatment for neurasthenia and hysteria (both considered women’s diseases) was to make them overeat and rest. In addition, Mitchell states that the caregiver should not indulge the patient and not let the patient have what she wants. Thus, Mitchell suggests that the patient never knows what is best for her. “The Yellow Wallpaper” contradicts this, however, by showing the narrator’s tailspin into insanity. She pleads with her husband to take her away from the house and to get rid of the wallpaper, but using the logic of S. Weir Mitchell, he refuses to give in to her “indulgences.” His inability to understand her needs by following Weir Mitchell’s medical doctrine ultimately causes the narrator’s lapse into sanity and shows to the audience that this type of “treatment” did not help anyone.

If you want to read S. Weir Mitchell’s manuscript about the rest cure, which I advise because it is both funny and maddening, you can do so at http://www.gutenberg.org/files/16230/16230-h/16230-h.htm#CHAPTER_V . That link takes you directly to Chapter 5: Rest, the ones around it are also highly entertaining/maddening/scary. (I say that it is entertaining/maddening/scary because it is entertaining to think these people actually thought they knew what they were talking about, maddening to think that they actually treated women this way, and also scary to think that they not only treated women this way but also truly thought it was helping them!)

If you want to read “The Yellow Wallpaper”, it is available online as well. You can read it at http://gilman.thefreelibrary.com/Yellow-Wallpaper. I strongly encourage you to read this short story if you have not. I think it is one of the best short stories I have ever read and I take something new out of it every time I read it.