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."
