Charlotte Perkins Gilm A Feminist Writer

The rest cure was one of the treatments given to women with hysteria. The narrator in “The Yellow Wallpaper” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, experienced the treatment and the outcome of the treatment. In my belief, the rest cure was somewhat a form of punishment toward the narrator and other women in the Victorian Era, in the 1900s. From the beginning of the short story, the narrator stated that her husband John was a physician of high standing and that he prescribed her rest, the rest cure. (Gilman 553) Her condition was hysteria a very common diagnosis in women in the 1900s. The rest cure was the one of the preferred treatments in that era. The rest cure meant that she had to stay isolated from family and friends for three months, placed on a fatty, milk-based diet, and forbidden to work. (Gilman 553) I believe all of these things led her to go insane. “The Yellow Wallpaper” took place in the late 1900s. In the Victorian Era, a woman’s sole purpose in life was to bear children and make their husbands happy. Also, women dressed in very tight corsets which would sometimes cut oxygen and women were fainting. Women also, could not show their ankles, and if they did, they were considered a prostitute.

The “rest cure” was a common treatment for depression in women in the nineteenth and early twentieth century. Women were locked in a room involuntarily and forced to “rest.” The patient was locked in a room and not allowed to leave or function in any type of way. The narrator in Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s story The Yellow Wallpaper is subjected to this cure. The story is written to expose the cruelty of the “resting cure”. Gilman uses the wall paper to represent the narrators sense of entrapment, the notion of creativity gone astray, and a distraction that becomes an obsession.

Today, women have more freedoms than we did in the early nineteenth century. We have the right to vote, seek positions that are normally meant for men, and most of all, the right to use our minds. However, for women in the late 1800’s, they were brought up to be submissive housewives who were not allowed to express their own interests. In the story, “The Yellow Wallpaper,” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, a woman is isolated from the world and her family because she is suffering from a temporary illness. Under her husband’s care, she undergoes a treatment called “rest cure” prescribed by her doctor, Dr. Weir Mitchell. It includes bed rest, no emotional or physical stimulus, and

In 1877, a prominent American physician named Dr. Silas Weir Mitchell developed what he called the "rest cure" for hysterical women. It involved strange restrictions and routines, which in this day and age would be considered cruel and unusual imprisonment. He wrote, "I do not permit the patient to sit up or to sew or write or read. The only action allowed is that needed to clean the teeth." At the end of six weeks to two months of such treatment, he expected that women would be as good as new. It was stated by a medical journal of the time, that a physician must "assume a tone of authority" and that the idea of a "cured" woman was one who became "subdued, docile, silent, and above all subject to the will and voice of the physician." Famous

“The Yellow Wallpaper,” written by Charlotte Perkins Gilman in 1892, is a great example of early works pertaining to feminism and the disease of insanity. Charlotte Gilman’s own struggles as a woman, mother, and wife shine through in this short story capturing the haunting realism of a mental breakdown.The main character, much like Gilman herself, slips into bouts of depression after the birth of her child and is prescribed a ‘rest cure’ to relieve the young woman of her suffering. Any use of the mind or source of stimulus is strictly prohibited, including the narrator’s favorite hobby of writing. The woman’s husband, a physician, installs into his wife that the rest treatment is correct and will only due harm if not followed through. This type of treatment ultimately drives the woman insane, causing her to envision a woman crawling behind the yellow wallpaper of her room. Powerlessness and repression the main character is subject to creates an even more poignant message through the narrator’s mental breakdown. The ever present theme of subordination of women in “The Yellow Wallpaper” is advanced throughout the story by the literary devices of symbolism, imagery, and allegory.

Mitchell was predisposed to think that women did not need to leave there bed or even their homes when they were ill. The rest cure also exacerbated normal gender roles of that era. Men were the ones who belonged in the outside world; they were the bread winners. Men needed to be outside of the home and to take care of the needs of everyone in it. In contrast, women were supposed to inside the home of take care of the home. Dr. Mitchell ensures men were not feeling emasculated by being subject to the same treatment as women and be subject to their homes where they felt only women were supposed to be. The story “The Yellow Wallpaper” by Gilman, highlight the mental distress that the rest cure tolls on your mental state. Gilman wrote “The Yellow Wallpaper” because of her experience on the rest cure and she wanted to “save people from being driven crazy”. Another reason that Gilman could have written the short story is to show that women need intellectual stimulation as much as men and that living domestically and not doing things that express a person’s creative side could drive them insane.

Until the medical breakthroughs that we have made in the modern day, psychology as a science was not fully understood. Modern technology has given us a clearer idea of psychology, but in the past there was less known about the science. This alongside a predominantly male medical discourse led to a medical diagnosis in many women called hysteria. Female hysteria was a medical diagnosis given to specifically women as far back as the ancient Greek civilization. Hysteria started as a supernatural phenomena, but as medicine evolved it would be described as a mental disorder, (Tasca). Hysteria. in actuality, is an absurd and fabricated diagnosis that institutionalized and discriminated countless women. The way it makes a women feel, and the fact that it strips a woman of any sort of free will is a sickening display of blatant misogyny. “The Yellow Wallpaper” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman perfectly displays not only the misogyny, but the torture a woman must face trapped under a hysteria diagnosis. Hysteria as a diagnoses fails to effectively treat many women, instead leading to the mistreatment and wrongful institutionalization of women.

The doctor’s anecdote of his wife taking phosphates, tonics, journeys and air along with exercise was above reproach. If women had more of a voice, would approaches to treatment for mental illness have been more effective? Feeling powerless, the wife was relieved of her duties and cared for by her husband, the housekeeping was done by Jennie, her sister-in-law, and Mary cared for the baby.

In “The Yellow wallpaper”, the wallpaper is a metaphor that expresses women’s protest against the repression of the society and their personal identity at the rise of feminism. During the Victorian era, women were kept down and kept in line by their married men and other men close to them. "The Yellow Wallpaper", written By Charlotte Perkins Gilman, is a tale of a woman, her mental difficulties and her husband’s so called therapeutic treatment ‘rest cure’ of her misery during the late 1800s. The tale starts out in the summer with a young woman and her husband travelling for the healing powers of being out from writing, which only appears to aggravate her condition. His delusion gets Jane (protagonist), trapped in a room, shut up in a bed making her go psychotic. As the tale opens, she begins to imagine a woman inside ‘the yellow wallpaper’.

Anne Stiles details that Silas Weir Mitchell developed the rest cure in the late 1800s to treat hysteria and other nervous conditions. The treatment usually lasted from six to eight weeks where patients were confined to their bed and “sometimes prohibited from talking, reading, writing and even sewing.” Women were also force fed a fat-dense diet, consisting of red meat, and three to four pints of milk each day to promote weight gain and were not allowed to turn over or be moved from the bed without permission. Stiles explains that physicians prescribed a rest cure for conditions they were unsure about. However, the narrator’s condition probably arose from giving birth and depression emotional depression that followed.

physician who has given her a ‘rest cure’: to resist all intellectual activity. This unnamed

Within the medical community, doctors often neglected women 's health during the nineteenth century. Society viewed women as weak and fragile beings making them more susceptible to illness. Surprisingly some believed that women could consciously control their sickness to gain attention or to avoid their womanly duties (Poirier 16). Silas Weir Mitchell was a well-known neurologist during Gilman 's life. He made many medical discoveries during his career along with creating treatment for locomotor ataxia (a nervous disease), neurotic women, and gunshot wounds that disrupted the nervous systems (Poirier 17). This procedure, called the Rest Cure, consists of the patient resting and exerting as little energy as possible alongside maintaining a balanced diet. Gillman personally visited Mitchell in seek of help during a time of great depression post the birth of her daughter. However, his treatment did not help but, caused her almost to lose her sanity. Gillman addresses Mitchel in her literature "John says if I don’t pick up faster he shall send me to Weir Mitchell in the fall. But I don’t want to go there at all. I had a friend who was in his hands once, and she says he is just like John and my brother (Gilman 197)." Janes husband, brother, and Mitchell are alike in the fact they all believe a woman 's hysteria correlates with their sex. These men also agree in one form of treatment: isolation, rest, and food. Showing that men of

In the year 1892, Charlotte Perkins Stetson wrote a short story called The Yellow Wallpaper. During the time Stetson wrote the story, some women were suffering from depression or extreme cases of nervousness. These women would see a neurologist or a psychiatrist who would prescribe them with the rest cure. The rest cure was “a regimen of forced bed rest, restricted diet, and a combination of massage and electrical muscle stimulation in place of exercise. ”(Harris)

To begin with, one can analyze “The Yellow Wallpaper” by examining the aspect of dialogue through the male perspective. Gilman makes a strong statement about males in society during her time period. The men are portrayed to really see women as children more than as individuals. This is made clear when the Narrator says, “If a physician of high standing, and one’s own husband, assures friends and relatives that there is really nothing the matter with one but temporary nervous depression- - slight hysterical tendency- - what is one to do?” (Gilman). Gilman shows the male perspective through dialogue because the Narrator explains that no matter what she says her husband shrugs away her illness. He strongly believes that his wife is being overly dramatic and that nothing is wrong. The typical male makes his wife a conformist by enforcing his beliefs on her. The husband truly believes that nothing is wrong with his wife so he ignores the problem and adds to his wife’s illness. The Narrator also falls victim to oppression through derogatory names on behalf of her husband. This is made clear when the husband interacts with the Narrator, “The he took me in his arms and called me a blessed little goose, and said he would go down to the cellar, if I wished , and have it Whitewashed into the bargain” (Gilman). The key phrase in the quote is “little goose”, the husband treats his wife like a child and speaks to her as such. This shows how much intelligence the husband thinks his wife has. He degrades his wife by using terms that one would typically use to speak to little

     In the late nineteenth century, after the American social and economic shift commonly referred to as the "Industrial Revolution" had changed the very fabric of American society, increased attention was paid to the psychological disorders that apparently had steamed up out of the new smokestacks and skyscrapers in urban populations (Bauer, 131).  These disorders were presumed to have been born out of the exhaustion and "wear and tear" of industrial society (Bauer, 131-132).  An obvious effect of these new disorders was a slew of physicians and psychiatrists advocating one sort of cure or another, although the "rest cure" popularized by the physician S. Weir Mitchell was the most