The Yellow Wallpaper: Science & Women's Health

I gave a guest lecture on "The Yellow Wallpaper" by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, and I wanted to avoid discussion of the wallpaper. I knew that the professor would likely want to talk about all of the shifting imagery of the paper, so my purpose here was to take a different approach. 

Throughout the lecture, I referred to several passages which I neglected to write down in this lesson plan, but in reading these notes, I largely thought that the arguments were still fairly sound. The notes in box brackets [] denote an action item or item for discussion.

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The way that I read "The Yellow Wallpaper" is as a fictionalized discussion of women's health in relation to science and medicine.

In order to clarify what I mean, we need some background information on how science and medicine have treated women's health in the past, and there is no better example of that than in the word "hysteria."

What does hysteria mean?

[they define] 

They actually have difficulty defining it beyond "highly anxious," which is interesting: they can give examples of hysteria, and they know it when they see it, but to define it proves difficult.

[I define]

So when we hear the word hysteria (or its cousins, hysterical, hysterics, etc), we have this impression of what the word means. However, the root of the word is latin, and means "wandering uterus."

This was originally a medical term that was used to explain women's extreme mood swings. We know that there are many medical reasons why women especially have changes in emotion: these can be related to pregnancy, lack of pregnancy, or post-pregnancy; menopause; puberty; depression and anxiety; thyroid conditions, and so on. Keep in mind that women are imagined to be "feminine," which means that they are soft and nurturing, not angry or excitable, or sad and detached. The inability to perform "proper" female emotion was seen as a medical condition. The answer that 17th century doctors determined to explain all emotional issues that a woman can experience was... their uterus: in particular, that their uterus was detached and wandering around, bumping into stuff and causing emotional outbursts, and so on.

So you are all logical thinkers: you have discovered that an organ is wandering around bumping into stuff. What do you do?

[you remove it!]

They figure this one out right away, to general hilarity.

We know now, (in this fascinating modern age we live in!) that removing a uterus actually causes even more hormone imbalances.

This short story is about the medical methods that are used to try and "cure" the narrator.

A scientific / feminist reading enables us to see a lot more about the text than we might otherwise miss:

·        When she refers to being alone, we recognize that this is actually a medical treatment. The sun and the air provided in the room are also part of her treatment.

·        When she refers to her husband as her prescribing physician, we recognize that women's health is further dismissed because there doesn't seem to be an acknowledgement that it is unethical for him to treat his own wife. The point Gilman is making is that the husband is refusing to see her problems as authentic. The issue that we can read from that is that women's health issues were considered below thinking about conflicts of interest or the ethics of treating your own family members and so on. (Another thought: is it possible for a male doctor to be conflicted by his feelings for his patient if he is a man and has no feelings?)

·        When she refers to it being lucky that Mary is so good with the baby, but she can't deal with it because she is nervous, she is referring to her own baby and her feelings about it. This gives us a clue as to what actually ails her:

[post partum depression]

They eventually get to this; the mentions of the baby are so subtle that I missed them on the first reading, but eventually one of the students comes up with this answer.

At this point, I say that we should largely try to avoid diagnosing fictional characters, especially with mental issues of any kind, because a fictional character is just that. HOWEVER, we are cheating a little bit: we know that Gilman had a nervous breakdown following her own pregnancy, so we can reasonably assume that the similarities between the narrator's condition and actual symptoms of post-partum depression are quite accurate, at least within Gilman's experience

·        When the narrator says that writing makes her feel better, but she is told that it is not good for her, Gilman is pointing to an actual treatment that was prescribed for women of all manner of health issues: they were quite frequently kept from reading, from writing, from exercise, and from house work (but not always the latter!) in order to keep their minds and bodies from becoming "excited." The narrator's point that she feels better when she writes suggests that her feelings about her own body are being ignored at the advice of what (rudimentary) science tells her doctors.

·        As the narrator's condition progresses (the wallpaper continues to bother her, the sights and smells get more pronounced, and she suddenly sees a woman within the paper), we can see that her isolation and her lack of stimulation has given way to delusions and dissociative thinking. (If you see the woman as another being, then it's delusional; if you see the woman as being herself within the paper, it's dissociative)

Reading the short story for medical methodology is fruitful because we can see how Gilman is pointing to very specific ideas in science and suggesting that they are deeply incorrect.

However, we also cannot claim that Gilman is a scientific genius before her time: she is merely pointing out that women's experience - the patient experience - should be part of the medical process. But she is not able to tell us what the condition is, what exactly her narrator is suffering, or other details that we can read into the text given our position in time and history. We should therefore be careful of such readings.

Similarly, Gilman gives us another reasons to be suspicious of a scientific or medical explanation for what's occurring to the character. What clue does Gilman give us as to the reason for the narrator's behaviour?

[the foreshadowing of the haunted house, therefore supernatural forces at work]

I go back and read the intro to the story, and they immediately understand that there is some gothic stuff happening here. I love doing this, too, because here I've just - apparently - undermined my own reading to give them a different direction to consider.

For this reason, this text is often read as early American Gothic, or feminist gothic, because it concerns issues of the Gothic as well as feminist themes.

If I were to write an essay claiming that Gilman is making a point about female medicine, I would use all of the arguments that I gave to you, but I would add that the author is likely adding in these supernatural and gothic details in order to prevent her text from being taken too politically: if she can wave critics away by saying "Oh it's just a gothic fantasy," critics and scientists in the medical community can't criticize her for not knowing what she's talking about. The short story is in fact the very place where she CAN criticize medical practices with regards to female health, because she is taken less seriously as a critic of the science because she is "just a writer."