The Yellow Wallpaper, by Charlotte Perkins-Gilman
As often seems to be the case with particularly special books, I came across The Yellow Wallpaper just when I needed it most. Several years ago, when I was in my mid-twenties, I had a nervous breakdown. In my worst moments I could barely move and could not speak, even though the words I desperately wanted to say were in my head, it was as though they were hiding on the other side of my forehead, and there they stayed. Sometimes, often after an hour or so of uncontrollable hysteria, it felt of the utmost importance to move around the interior of my home as quietly as possible. I would stay close to the walls, almost creeping about the place.
One of the most upsetting elements for me at this time was my inability to absorb myself in books. All my life I have loved books and read voraciously; being able to sink into the pages of the stories of others has been therapeutic and given me strength on a regular basis. Now I was faced with not being able to even understand the words in front of me, let alone the concept of a page or book. Even road signs were a bit of a mystery at times. After many months recovering, I finally reached a stage where I was once again able to lose myself in other people’s fictions, but suddenly I found I wanted a different kind of truth than the kind one finds in novels.
I had felt the stigma that still comes with illnesses of the mind and had felt ashamed of my ‘condition’, felt weak for allowing it to dominate me, had even managed to keep it a secret from the vast majority of friends and family members. Even those who did know were certainly unaware of just how ill I was. I felt alone in the cold cell of unique experience, so now I could read again all I wanted was accounts of other people also being dominated by what Winston Churchill named as his ‘black dog’. I read hungrily, devouring book after book of non-fiction accounts of breakdowns, depression and anxiety, scouring the pages for similarity of experience, making lists from the bibliographies of more books to read. Whilst I was somewhat reassured that I was not alone in what I had gone through, there was something missing, I was not learning anything new about myself, or indeed about the human condition. Listed in one of the bibliographies however wasThe Yellow Wallpaper, by Charlotte Perkins Gilman. I had never heard of it, did not know if it was fiction or non-fiction or even if it was in print but, apart from being attracted by its title, something told me I had to read it. Not to be found on any of the shelves in any of the book shops in my nearest city, I had an anxious fortnight wait while I waited for my order to arrive.
I have to admit I was slightly disappointed on the Thursday afternoon I collected my new acquisition; it would not be making any dents in the book shelf. My disappointment was short lived however. At just twenty-seven pages, The Yellow Wallpaper is a short story with the depth and layering of the best of novels.
The narrator is in the process of a breakdown and her physician husband, John, has prescribed the Rest Cure, taking her to an empty and remote ancestral hall and allocating her a room at the top of the house where the wallpaper is torn off in large patches all round the room “...repellent, almost revolting; a smouldering unclean yellow, strangely faded by the slow-turning sunlight.”
The Rest Cure was a treatment for ‘nervous weakness or disorder’ introduced by S. Weir Mitchell, a physician of high standing in the latter half of the nineteenth century. Conditions such as extreme anxiety and depression were thought of as illnesses only affecting women. Indeed, Mitchell himself believed that it was part of the make up of women, and declared “The man who does not know sick women does not know women.”
It involved being confined to bed for up to two months without any activity or stimulation. She would not be allowed visitors, or to read a book, to sew, write or even to sit up in bed. A nurse would feed the patient and would even insist on the same position being adopted and not to move without permission and help. The patient was not even allowed to leave the bed to use the toilet and in some cases was directed to use the bed pan lying down. In the last weeks of the Rest Cure, the importance of keeping ones feelings to oneself, rather than being weak and submitting to them, would be drummed into the patient, apparently to prevent the recurrence of the illness.
Gilman was herself treated by the highly respected and renowned Mitchell and sharply understood that his treatment was a kind of prison, that treating a mental illness with a physical ‘cure’ only made matters worse. The Yellow Wallpaper, which is the text the narrator is secretly penning when alone, wonderfully describes the heart breaking loneliness and boredom this treatment produced in its patients. The narrator becomes obsessed with the wallpaper, eventually seeing a woman trapped behind the complicated and oppressive pattern which surrounds her and mirrors the restrictions of the patriarchal society in which she lives. She imagines the woman in the wallpaper breaking free and writes that sometimes she even sees her from the window, walking across the garden, away from the house.
Her husband is away working in the city most of the time on ‘serious cases’ and the only other person in the house is her husbands sister, who is looking after the narrators baby, being careful to keep mother and baby far apart at all times. She finds herself trapped and alone, in an ‘ancestral hall’ which has been empty for years, and we can really feel the ghosts of women of previous generations, their apparent mental weakness being used as a tool for their own oppression and subjugation. Even though there are many rooms from which to choose, John has confined his wife to a former nursery which also contains the paraphernalia of an asylum or prison - bars on the windows, “rings and things” in the walls and a locked gate at the top of the stairs.
The Yellow Wallpaper is a profound and moving story of mental deterioration and as we read we feel almost spiritually connected with those women who longed to escape, who sometimes descended into madness because they were kept away from what would have made them healthy members of society, and the sadness of how the cure for that madness could often make the illness worse, sending the patient into a despair of entrapment and, as in The Yellow Wallpaper, finding that the only freedom and escape available to them in the end was to descend in a madness reminiscent of Bedlam, that here also lay some essence of a verisimilitude absent from the contradictions of being a woman expected to be everything to those around her, and nothing to herself.
Reading The Yellow Wallpaper brought me back to my beloved fiction, helped me start to feel alive again, reminded me that I have both a physical and mental self and that I should not feel ashamed of the illness from which I was slowly recovering any more than I should be ashamed of a broken leg, because it is shame that will hide us away and make it easier for others to say it is not their problem. Above all, The Yellow Wallpaper shows that sometimes, truth can only really be found in the pages of fiction.
__________
Charlotte Perkins Gilman, The Yellow Wallpaper
Virago. Pb. 64pp. £4.99
One of the most upsetting elements for me at this time was my inability to absorb myself in books. All my life I have loved books and read voraciously; being able to sink into the pages of the stories of others has been therapeutic and given me strength on a regular basis. Now I was faced with not being able to even understand the words in front of me, let alone the concept of a page or book. Even road signs were a bit of a mystery at times. After many months recovering, I finally reached a stage where I was once again able to lose myself in other people’s fictions, but suddenly I found I wanted a different kind of truth than the kind one finds in novels.
I had felt the stigma that still comes with illnesses of the mind and had felt ashamed of my ‘condition’, felt weak for allowing it to dominate me, had even managed to keep it a secret from the vast majority of friends and family members. Even those who did know were certainly unaware of just how ill I was. I felt alone in the cold cell of unique experience, so now I could read again all I wanted was accounts of other people also being dominated by what Winston Churchill named as his ‘black dog’. I read hungrily, devouring book after book of non-fiction accounts of breakdowns, depression and anxiety, scouring the pages for similarity of experience, making lists from the bibliographies of more books to read. Whilst I was somewhat reassured that I was not alone in what I had gone through, there was something missing, I was not learning anything new about myself, or indeed about the human condition. Listed in one of the bibliographies however wasThe Yellow Wallpaper, by Charlotte Perkins Gilman. I had never heard of it, did not know if it was fiction or non-fiction or even if it was in print but, apart from being attracted by its title, something told me I had to read it. Not to be found on any of the shelves in any of the book shops in my nearest city, I had an anxious fortnight wait while I waited for my order to arrive.
I have to admit I was slightly disappointed on the Thursday afternoon I collected my new acquisition; it would not be making any dents in the book shelf. My disappointment was short lived however. At just twenty-seven pages, The Yellow Wallpaper is a short story with the depth and layering of the best of novels.
The narrator is in the process of a breakdown and her physician husband, John, has prescribed the Rest Cure, taking her to an empty and remote ancestral hall and allocating her a room at the top of the house where the wallpaper is torn off in large patches all round the room “...repellent, almost revolting; a smouldering unclean yellow, strangely faded by the slow-turning sunlight.”
The Rest Cure was a treatment for ‘nervous weakness or disorder’ introduced by S. Weir Mitchell, a physician of high standing in the latter half of the nineteenth century. Conditions such as extreme anxiety and depression were thought of as illnesses only affecting women. Indeed, Mitchell himself believed that it was part of the make up of women, and declared “The man who does not know sick women does not know women.”
It involved being confined to bed for up to two months without any activity or stimulation. She would not be allowed visitors, or to read a book, to sew, write or even to sit up in bed. A nurse would feed the patient and would even insist on the same position being adopted and not to move without permission and help. The patient was not even allowed to leave the bed to use the toilet and in some cases was directed to use the bed pan lying down. In the last weeks of the Rest Cure, the importance of keeping ones feelings to oneself, rather than being weak and submitting to them, would be drummed into the patient, apparently to prevent the recurrence of the illness.
Gilman was herself treated by the highly respected and renowned Mitchell and sharply understood that his treatment was a kind of prison, that treating a mental illness with a physical ‘cure’ only made matters worse. The Yellow Wallpaper, which is the text the narrator is secretly penning when alone, wonderfully describes the heart breaking loneliness and boredom this treatment produced in its patients. The narrator becomes obsessed with the wallpaper, eventually seeing a woman trapped behind the complicated and oppressive pattern which surrounds her and mirrors the restrictions of the patriarchal society in which she lives. She imagines the woman in the wallpaper breaking free and writes that sometimes she even sees her from the window, walking across the garden, away from the house.
Her husband is away working in the city most of the time on ‘serious cases’ and the only other person in the house is her husbands sister, who is looking after the narrators baby, being careful to keep mother and baby far apart at all times. She finds herself trapped and alone, in an ‘ancestral hall’ which has been empty for years, and we can really feel the ghosts of women of previous generations, their apparent mental weakness being used as a tool for their own oppression and subjugation. Even though there are many rooms from which to choose, John has confined his wife to a former nursery which also contains the paraphernalia of an asylum or prison - bars on the windows, “rings and things” in the walls and a locked gate at the top of the stairs.
The Yellow Wallpaper is a profound and moving story of mental deterioration and as we read we feel almost spiritually connected with those women who longed to escape, who sometimes descended into madness because they were kept away from what would have made them healthy members of society, and the sadness of how the cure for that madness could often make the illness worse, sending the patient into a despair of entrapment and, as in The Yellow Wallpaper, finding that the only freedom and escape available to them in the end was to descend in a madness reminiscent of Bedlam, that here also lay some essence of a verisimilitude absent from the contradictions of being a woman expected to be everything to those around her, and nothing to herself.
Reading The Yellow Wallpaper brought me back to my beloved fiction, helped me start to feel alive again, reminded me that I have both a physical and mental self and that I should not feel ashamed of the illness from which I was slowly recovering any more than I should be ashamed of a broken leg, because it is shame that will hide us away and make it easier for others to say it is not their problem. Above all, The Yellow Wallpaper shows that sometimes, truth can only really be found in the pages of fiction.
__________
Charlotte Perkins Gilman, The Yellow Wallpaper
Virago. Pb. 64pp. £4.99
posted by Annabel at 11:35 pm
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