The Yellow Wall-Paper

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’. 

The treatment offered to the anonymous Victorian narrator of the story refers rather explicitly to the ‘rest cure’ popularised by physician Silas Weir Mitchell (1829-1914), who prescribed it to Gilman herself in the late 1880s before she ultimately resolved to disregard his advice. Mitchell’s suggestion to Gilman was that she ought to lead as domestic an existence as possible, which itself highlights the gendered overtones of the treatment.[1]  Indeed, most of Mitchell’s patients were, in his own words, ‘oversensitive, refined, educated women’ for whom such repose ‘becomes a rather bitter medicine’ (Mitchell, p.51).[2] 

The pattern of the eponymous wallpaper that the narrator comes to find so repulsive has been widely interpreted as a metaphor for the relative imprisonment and subjection that defined Victorian ideas of womanhood.  Shulman writes, for example, that the pattern ‘comes to suggest the configuration of values and practices that govern the relation between men and women, husbands and wives, male physicians and female patients’, and that it ‘involves the socially acceptable power relations of a world controlled by men’.[3]  In this sense, the act of ripping down the wallpaper constitutes not only the liberation of the woman she sees behind the bars, but also the ‘renovation’ of a male-dominated medical and social discourse.[4]  

The initial cause of the narrator’s illness is not clearly identified; her domineering physician husband seems largely clueless, and her treatment, based on Weir Mitchell’s now infamous ‘cure’ does little to alleviate her symptoms. On the contrary it rather intensifies them to the point of complete mental breakdown.  Indeed, Shulman writes that at the heart of Mitchell’s rest cure lies ‘the assumption that women are intellectually inferior to men, that the source of their ‘neurasthenia’ or ‘hysteria’ is the overuse of their minds’ (Shulman, p.viii). 

The narrator is forbidden from engaging in the sort of intellectual stimulation she might derive from lively company and such ‘congenial work’ as writing, in spite of her own belief that this might provide some relief from her condition.[5]  The sense of her own immobility is emphasised by the physical description of the room to which she has been confined: the bars on her window, the rings on the wall, and the peculiar, static image of the ‘great immovable bed’, which is nailed to the floor, and from which the narrator observes, and grows increasingly obsessed with, the wallpaper (Gilman, p.9).

The long-held conventions that mark this confinement, and that justify the segregation of the sexes, are established at the very outset.  The reference to ‘ancestral halls’ presents the space in which the story takes place as a firmly established,  age-old institution, as does the phrase ‘hereditary estate’ which also foregrounds the tradition of patrilineal inheritance, a system which has long placed women at a patent disadvantage.  Whilst both these details could just as easily be read as background features which simply serve to ground the story within the Gothic tradition, they also work to compound the narrator’s increasing sense of isolation in the context of a firmly entrenched, hereditary set of institutions and attitudes.  In other words, her physical confinement under the direction of the objectively sexist ‘rest cure’ is analogous to the constriction implied by her socially inherited role as middle class wife and mother.  The way in which John is introduced to the story is indicative of the accepted power imbalance that governed male and female relationships in the nineteenth century: ‘John laughs at me, but of course one accepts that in marriage’.  He is described first and foremost as a ‘physician of high standing’, and then as ‘one’s own husband’, the implication being that his professional occupation naturally supersedes his domestic role.  Having established her husband’s profession, the narrator then asserts: ‘Personally, I disagree with their ideas. / Personally, I believe that congenial work, with excitement and change, would do me good’ (Gilman, p.3).  By prefacing her statements about her own health with the adverb ‘personally’, the narrator concedes that her ideas and opinions have no authority in the professional space occupied by her husband, brother, and physician, and are relegated to the strictly ‘personal’, domestic sphere.

The patient’s internalisation of these values and expectations seems to aggravate the illness. The authority of the narrator’s husband is such that his language permeates much of the narrative itself, particularly at the beginning of the story.  His diagnosis is inserted within parenthesis as the narrator describes the nature of her illness ‘– a slight hysterical tendency –’ as if imitating his exact terminology lends credibility her own description (Gilman, p.3).  The narrator even goes so far as to cut herself off with the same kind of ‘rational’ entreaties she might expect  from her husband: ‘I sometimes fancy that in my condition if I had less opposition and more society and stimulus – but John says the very worst thing to do is to think about my condition’ (Gilman, p.4).  Throughout the story, she continues to defer to her husband in a similar way, but becomes increasingly contradictory as her madness progresses.

John, following the precedent set by Weir Mitchell, chooses to concentrate his treatment for his wife’s depression solely on the alleviation of her physical symptoms, refusing to entertain the possibility that she might have a more complex psychological problem than the ‘slight hysterical tendency’ he presumes lies at the root of her illness (Gilman, p.3).  The narrator’s frustration and descent into madness is testament to the shortcomings of this ‘cure’, but Gilman herself explains this more explicitly in her article ‘Why I Wrote The Yellow Wallpaper’.  She writes that ‘[Weir Mitchell] put me to bed and applied the rest cure, to which a still good physique responded so promptly that he concluded there was nothing much the matter with me’.  Similarly, John, as Shumaker notes, is only concerned with the ‘concrete’,[6]  and ‘scoffs openly at any talk of things not to be felt and seen and put down in figures’ (Gilman, p.3).  He responds to his wife’s concern that there is ‘something strange about the house’, by concluding that what she feels is draught, and simply shuts the window (Gilman, p.4).  Despite hearing that she does not feel any improvement, he promptly dismisses her, prioritizing his own perception of her health and his feelings about her over her idea of either: ‘You are gaining flesh and colour, your appetite is better, I really feel much easier about you’ (Gilman, p.11).  When the narrator attempts to relay her own symptoms, she is again cut off: ‘“Better in body perhaps –” I began, and stopped short for he sat straight up and looked at me with such a stern, reproachful look that I could not say another word’ (Gilman, p.12).

John’s refusal allow his wife to write, and his refusal to listen to her symptoms as she experiences them,  are themselves acts of silencing.  Though the narrator concedes that writing does indeed exhaust her, this is largely because she is forced to expend her energy on being ‘so sly about it, or else be met with heavy opposition’ (Gilman, p.4).  Thus, ‘by trying to ignore and repress her imagination […] John eventually brings about the very circumstance he wants to prevent’ (Shumaker, p.590).

The kind of ‘talking cure’ advocated in modern discussions of mental health is not a solution offered in ‘The Yellow Wall-Paper’, but the narrator seems sure that it would help: ‘I must say what I feel and think in some way – it is such a relief!’ (Gilman, p.10).  Her small act of rebellion in writing a journal against her husband’s instructions indicates that she is, as Shumaker states, attempting to reach ‘the listener she cannot otherwise find’ (Shumaker, p.593).  The consistent use of the second person pronoun ‘you’ suggests that the narrator has indeed created her own audience; the ‘you’ she addresses becomes a figure of confidence to whom she can reveal the symptoms of her illness that her husband deliberately undercuts and ultimately disregards.  In this context, the repeated interrogatives, ‘what is one to do?’, ‘what can one do?’ demonstrate a similar desire to reach a sympathetic audience (perhaps an audience with answers) whilst also foregrounding her sense of helplessness (Gilman, p.3-4).  Eventually, the narrator seems to become the woman she sees behind the wallpaper, (perhaps the first step toward enacting that ‘renovation’ I mentioned earlier?). She is liberated. She tells her husband:

‘I’ve got out at last […] And I’ve pulled off most of the paper, so you can’t put me back!’ (Gilman, p.19) 

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Works Cited

[1] Charlotte Perkins Gilman, ‘Why I Wrote The Yellow Wallpaper’ (1913) http://www.nlm.nih.gov/literatureofprescription/exhibitionAssets/digitalDocs/WhyIWroteYellowWallPaper.pdf

[2] Silas Weir Mitchell, Fat and Blood: An Essay on the Treatment of Certain Forms of Neurasthenia and Hysteria, (London: J.B. Lippincott & Co., 1884), p.51.

[3] Robert Shulman, ‘Introduction’ in The Yellow Wall-Paper and Other Stories, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), vii-xxxii, p.vii.

[4] Carol Margaret Davison, ‘Haunted House/Haunted Heroine: Female Gothic Closets in “The Yellow Wallpaper”’ , Women’s Studies, Vol 33 (2004), 47-75, p.49.

[5] Charlotte Perkins Gilman, ‘The Yellow Wall-Paper’ (1890); repr. in The Yellow Wall-Paper and Other Stories, ed. by Robert Shulman (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 3-19, p.3.

[6] Conrad Shumaker “Too Terribly Good to Be Printed”: Charlotte Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper”, American Literature, Vol. 57, No. 4 (Dec 1985), pp. 588-599, p.591.