Expressions // The Female Liver: Gender and Mental Health in The Yellow Wall-Paper
‘The clearness and strength of the brain of the woman prove continually the injustice of the clamorous contempt long poured upon what was scornfully called “the female mind”. There is no female mind. The Brain is not an organ of sex. As well speak of a female liver.’
– Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Women and Economics
When I decided I wanted to start a blog to fill the book-shaped void left in my life when I finished my degree, my initial plan of action was rather hamstrung by the question of what I might title it. Such was my indecision that I eventually had a list of subjects I wanted to explore, a notebook full of articles I’d already drafted, and nowhere to publish any of these ideas.
Before I settled on “The Spirit of the Page”, a reference to Hazlitt’s 1825 collection of essays, The Spirit of the Age, my preferred contender was “The Female Liver”, a nod to the Charlotte Perkins Gilman quotation above, and by extension the implicit assertion of my own feminist principles (at this point I need hardly explain the thrust of her argument).
Particularly astute, I thought, was the double meaning of “liver”: this was also a declaration that I, a female(!) am living, therefore a live-er, and here was a space in which I could record the evidence of that fact (the evidence being my ideas, obviously). Eyeroll.
I decided, quite rightly, I think, that this logic was more than a little convoluted, and that the meaning behind the name was vague enough without a circumlocutory explanation not unlike the one I’m attempting to provide now. Rather than the suggestion of female experience I was convinced it conveyed, it instead conjured images of the actual organ, that genderless liver. I’d like to think my focus on women-centric writing is still obvious enough without having to expressly mention the word “female” atop anything I publish here, but I’d still like to explore the text that prompted my interest in Gilman in the first place. So, in honour of the name that wasn’t, here is a long overdue articulation of my thoughts about the rest cure, gender, and mental health in Gilman’s short story ‘The Yellow Wall-Paper’.
