Despite often being seen as a very early feminist criticism of the male-centred sphere of science – a topic notably emerging throughout the Victorian era – ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’ is not only a standalone novella, but rather a product of the near 4,000-year history of the medical diagnosis of ‘hysteria’, and the abuse of women through medicine. Hysteria, from the Greek ‘hystera’ (uterus), can be defined as ‘an old-fashioned term for a psychological disorder characterized by conversion of psychological stress into physical symptoms (somatization) or a change in self-awareness (such as a fugue state or selective amnesia)’, and is characterised by its ‘femininity’, with non-conformist women being wedged into this diagnosis through patriarchal science from around 1900 BCE until the 1950s. The diagnosis was not only prevalent in the West among mainly white women but had its pre-history in Ancient Egypt, and was found in the Far East and Middle East.
Historically, the uterus was believed to wander around the body like an animal, hungry for semen; if the organ wandered the wrong direction and made its way to the throat there would be choking, coughing or loss of voice, if it got stuck in the rib cage, there would be chest pain or shortness of breath – as such, any medical condition of a woman could be ascribed to a failing of the her uterus, an extension of her ‘failure’ to fulfil a patriarchal purpose. Superficial and misogynistic ‘treatments’, including vaginal fumigations, bitter potions, balms, and pessaries made of wool, were used to bring that uterus back to its proper place; ‘genital massages’ performed by a skilled physician or midwife, was often mentioned in medical writings. The triad of marriage, intercourse, and pregnancy was the ultimate treatment for the male-hungry womb, and for the non-conformist woman by extension. Shakespearean ideology rapidly centralised the idea of ‘female hysteria’ alongside the pseudo-scientific ‘Four Humours’: black bile (melancholic), phlegm (phlegmatic), yellow bile (choleric) and blood (sanguine), which prompted medical attention to veer from the image of the hungry uterus to a woman’s ‘weaker nervous system’. Nineteenth-century physician Russell Thacher Trail approximated that three-quarters of all medical practice was devoted to the ‘diseases of women,’ and therefore physicians must be grateful to ‘frail women’ for being an economic godsend to the medical profession – an uncomfortable echo of Hamlet, ‘Frailty, thy name is woman!’ and countless other misogynistic diagnoses. This climax of patriarchal science culminated in the production of ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’ in 1892.
It was believed that hysteria, also known as neurasthenia, could be set off by a plethora of bad habits including reading novels (which caused erotic fantasies), masturbation, and homosexual or bisexual tendencies resulting in any number of symptoms such as seductive behaviours, contractures, functional paralysis, irrationality, and general 'trouble-making' of various kinds. There are pages and pages of medical writings outing hysterics as great liars who willingly deceive. The same old treatments were enlisted—genital massage by an approved provider, marriage and intercourse—but some new ones included ovariectomies and cauterization of the clitoris. Such a practice conveniently started to become obsessively popular at the same time the fight for women’s education rapidly evolved into being. A decrease in marriages and falling birth rates coincided with this medical diagnosis criticizing the ‘New Woman’ and her focus on intellectual, artistic, or activist pursuits instead of motherhood, following the same story as Gilman’s own narrator. As S. Weir Mitchell wrote, ‘The woman’s desire to be on a level of competition with man and to assume his duties is, I am sure, making mischief, for it is my belief that no length of generations of change in her education and modes of activity will ever really alter her characteristics.’
Following the birth of her first child, Gilman’s narrator says she feels sick, but her physician husband has dismissed her complaints as a ‘temporary nervous condition—a slight hysterical tendency.’, renting a country house and putting her to rest in the former nursery. She explains,
So I take phosphates or phosphites—whichever it is, and tonics, and journeys, and air, and exercise, and am absolutely forbidden to “work” until I am well again.
Personally, I disagree with their ideas.
Personally, I believe that congenial work, with excitement and change, would do me good.
But what is one to do?
The narrator’s work is that of a writer, the same melancholic ‘disease’ caused by other female writers, such as that of Aphra Behn, Edith Wharton and Virginia Woolf, hiding her paragraphs from her husband or his sister, ‘a perfect and enthusiastic housekeeper, and hopes for no better profession.’ The novella demonstrates the patriarchal diagnosis of hysteria as being detrimental, with the husband believing that the wife can ‘get better’ – and conform to patriarchal standard – through rest and willpower: ‘‘Bless her little heart!’ said he with a big hug, ‘she shall be as sick as she pleases.'’. The narrator’s steady decline is documented through her grotesque obsession with the room’s wallpaper: ‘the bloated curves and flourishes—a kind of ‘debased Romanesque’ with delirium tremens—go waddling up and down in isolated columns of fatuity.’ In the final scene of the story, the epitome of the mental illness, the narrator creeps along the edges of the former nursery amidst shreds of wallpaper, finally manifested into the trapped woman that she believed to have lived behind the walls, stepping over her crumpled husband who has fainted upon discovering his wife in such a state.
S. Weir Mitchell, renowned for becoming a ‘hysteria doctor’ and prescribing the ‘rest cure’ was Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s own physician; his cure was prescribed to some of the great minds of the time, including Edith Wharton and Virginia Woolf. Countless artists and writers were diagnosed as hysterics in a period when rebelliousness, shamelessness, ambition, and ‘over education’ were considered to be likely causes. Transgressing prescribed roles would make women sick. British suffragettes, for instance, were ‘treated as hysterics in prison; outspoken proponents for women’s rights were often characterized as the ‘shrieking sisterhood.’
As such, Gilman’s narrator’s own decline into madness can be read as cathartic, the woman finally able to both metaphorically and literally ‘step over’ her husband’s patriarchal control of her mental welfare and being. The Victorian’s obsession with medicine, but more notably ‘female illness’ or hysteria, stemmed from almost 4,000 years of misogynistic medical malpractice and the forced conforming of women artists, writers and workers, making ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’ a fascinating novella which documents the struggles of thousands of women.
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