The Yellow Wall-Paper

The Yellow Wall-paper

The journey into madness is a fascinating and morbid fall into oblivion that literary geniuses have been exploring since the dawn of the literary word. Insanity is such an interesting human state because it is a break from human normalcy. A person who is found insane can not be expected to take responsibility for any action committed while in this alternate state of mind. Even our judicial courts do not hold people criminally responsible for heinous acts, such as committing murder, if insanity at the time of the act is proven beyond a reasonable doubt. The short story, “The Yellow Wall-paper,” by Charlotte Gilman, is a captivating work that gives an intimate look of one woman’s desperate struggle to hang on to any thread of sanity, only to succumb to the inevitable downward spiral of her fragile mind. By combining an analysis of the S. Weir Mitchell’s “rest cure” prescription for the woman and the vivid description given in “The Yellow Wall-paper,” the journey of this woman’s fall into insanity can be dissected and analyzed to better understand why Gilman chose to write a work such as this. The literary symbolism which is prevalent in this story is also very important in understanding this work, as is Gilman’s own history of mental instability. Perhaps, by exploring the “rest cure” prescription, the literary symbolism, and the author’s own mental history, a better understanding of the human condition and societal influences explored in this work can be achieved.

Charlotte Gilman was born Charlotte Anna Perkins on July 3, 1860 in Hartford, Connecticut (Britannica 1). Because of her father’s abandonment of her family, she grew up in poverty and received irregular education. In May 1884, she married a man named Charles W. Stetson and soon realized that she was not suited for a domestic existence. She began suffering from a form of depression known as melancholia. Melancholia suffers have symptoms such as, “dullness, sleepiness…, apathy, inertia…joyless, affectionless…a general expression of fatigue and of sorrow” (Leuba 103). Eventually, she suffered a complete nervous breakdown. In 1888, she moved to Pasadena with her young daughter. In 1894, she divorced her husband, who soon remarried a close friend of hers. Gilman then sent her daughter to live with her father and his new wife, and was then able to completely focus her energy into writing, lecturing, and developing feminist theories for the women’s movement in the United States (Britannica 2-3). In 1892, “The Yellow Wall-paper,” was published in The New England Magazine. Two years earlier, Horace Scudder, editor of the Atlantic Monthly, was sent a copy of “The Yellow Wall-paper” by William Dean Howells and refused to print it. Scudder wrote a letter to Gilman explaining why he did not publish the story. It read, “Dear Madam, Mr. Howells has handed me this story. I could not forgive myself if I made others as miserable as I have made myself!” (Shumaker 588). It can be construed that “The Yellow Wall-paper” was inspired by Gilman’s own struggle with depression and the patriarchal setup of society at that time, and can shed light on Gilman’s own mental state. The detailed description of the character’s struggle to hold on to her sanity could only be expressed by someone who had experienced a similar struggle. After a diagnosis of breast cancer, Gilman took her own life by ingesting chloroform on August 17, 1935.

In “The Yellow Wall-paper,” the character is forced by her physician husband to endure a treatment known as the “rest cure.” “In the late 19th century, the medical profession believed that mental activity for a woman lead to nervousness and anxiety. Regardless of the reason for nervousness, the remedy was total bed rest and limited intellectual activity” (Thompson). Dr. S Weir Mitchell is credited in creating the treatment from his first paper on the subject titled “Rest and the Treatment of Nervous Diseases,” published in 1875. “Seclusion, rest, massage, electricity, and feeding have been the points on which he has laid particular stress” (Waterman 134). It was thought that without any sort of creative, mental, or physical stimulus, the patient would begin to recover. Dr. Mitchell also believed that an accumulation of fat and blood within the patient’s body would help as well. Even though many patients under his care did benefit from his expertise, the “rest cure” was not found to be particularly helpful. In fact, it was found to cause more harm than good. “…complete isolation undoubtedly does harm in certain types, and that the general result produced by the completeness of the regime owes its success rather to the suggestive influence than to any physical change that takes place” (Waterman 134). If any good came from the “rest cure,” it came from a