Jessica Granse
January 08, 2009
Journal #2
“And what can one do? If a physician of high standing, and one’s own husband, assures friends and relatives that there is really nothing the matter with one but temporary nervous depression – a slight hysterical tendency – what is one to do?” (808).
In “The Yellow Wall-paper,” Gilman illustrates the incredible amount at which women were trapped in the late 1800s and early 1900s. She did this through showing the mental illness that she herself suffered in which her treatment involved the advice of her never writing again. She was told what to do and told nothing was wrong, against her own suspicions.
Although she never suffered hallucinations, Gilman did have nervous breakdowns, as she announces in “Why I Wrote ‘The Yellow Wall-paper’”. Though Gilman’s breakdowns weren’t quite as severe as the character in her story, she tries to use these severities to show just how mad one can go when they’re told to isolate themselves and resist from doing anything intellectual or productive just because they’re a woman. It was believed that women suffer from hysteria due to the sole fact that they’re women. As it says on the second footnote of page 808, hysteria and uterus come from the same Greek root, so it was believed the reproductive parts of women were their source of mental illnesses. The doctor she was sent to, Dr Silas Weir Mitchell, explains this theory as quoted in Deborah Thomas’ paper “The Changing Role of Womanhood: From True Woman to New Woman in Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s ‘The Yellow Wall-paper’” from the ALRA site,
“American woman is, to speak plainly, too often physically unfit for her duties as woman, and is perhaps of all civilized females the least qualified to undertake those weightier tasks which tax so heavily the nervous system of man. She is not fairly up to what nature asks from her as wife and mother. How will she sustain herself under the pressure of those yet more exacting duties which nowadays she is eager to share with the man?”
Mitchell isolates American women as those that are unfit for their duties. He thinks that if women are already taxed by their own duties as wife and mother, there is no way they’ll be able to do the tasks that even trouble men. I would like to bring up the point that that’s not all Gilman was trying to do. Her biography from the Norton Anthology mentions about her first marriage, “She entered into the marriage reluctantly, anticipating the difficulties of reconciling her ambition to be a writer with the demands of being a wife, housekeeper, and mother,” (807). Gilman was trying to take on something that was considered one of “those weightier tasks which tax so heavily the nervous system of man”, writing. She was trying to be successful at her ambition and this was not a time in which women were very welcome to have any ambition beyond motherhood and wifehood. She was taking this on as well as the traditional duties assigned to women by society. Society, at that time, put more emphasis on the mother and wife’s role in the family and they were to take on the responsibilities of caring for the children. Maybe if there was less work automatically assigned to them around the house and the man of the house took an equal part in those responsibilities, women could have had a fair chance at their ambitions. To me, this seems like just a result of the fear of men having more competition. If women were able to compete with them in the world outside of the house, there would be twice as many people they had to compete with. Instead, they’d rather get all the glory by having the wife stay at home and all the household duties be done for them. They just weren’t ready to share the glory, so they made up a cure for these nervous breakdowns caused by the woman’s actual stress of not just following her ambitions but having to do all the housework, care for the children, and cook for the husband. This cure would also cure them of their fear of having to share the rest of the world with women: just make them bedridden. This was no cure at all, though. Instead, it made them feel isolated and useless.
In “The Yellow Wall-paper,” Gilman illustrates the incredible amount at which women were trapped in the late 1800s and early 1900s. She did this through showing the mental illness that she herself suffered in which her treatment involved the advice of her never writing again. She was told what to do and told nothing was wrong, against her own suspicions.
Although she never suffered hallucinations, Gilman did have nervous breakdowns, as she announces in “Why I Wrote ‘The Yellow Wall-paper’”. Though Gilman’s breakdowns weren’t quite as severe as the character in her story, she tries to use these severities to show just how mad one can go when they’re told to isolate themselves and resist from doing anything intellectual or productive just because they’re a woman. It was believed that women suffer from hysteria due to the sole fact that they’re women. As it says on the second footnote of page 808, hysteria and uterus come from the same Greek root, so it was believed the reproductive parts of women were their source of mental illnesses. The doctor she was sent to, Dr Silas Weir Mitchell, explains this theory as quoted in Deborah Thomas’ paper “The Changing Role of Womanhood: From True Woman to New Woman in Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s ‘The Yellow Wall-paper’” from the ALRA site,
“American woman is, to speak plainly, too often physically unfit for her duties as woman, and is perhaps of all civilized females the least qualified to undertake those weightier tasks which tax so heavily the nervous system of man. She is not fairly up to what nature asks from her as wife and mother. How will she sustain herself under the pressure of those yet more exacting duties which nowadays she is eager to share with the man?”
Mitchell isolates American women as those that are unfit for their duties. He thinks that if women are already taxed by their own duties as wife and mother, there is no way they’ll be able to do the tasks that even trouble men. I would like to bring up the point that that’s not all Gilman was trying to do. Her biography from the Norton Anthology mentions about her first marriage, “She entered into the marriage reluctantly, anticipating the difficulties of reconciling her ambition to be a writer with the demands of being a wife, housekeeper, and mother,” (807). Gilman was trying to take on something that was considered one of “those weightier tasks which tax so heavily the nervous system of man”, writing. She was trying to be successful at her ambition and this was not a time in which women were very welcome to have any ambition beyond motherhood and wifehood. She was taking this on as well as the traditional duties assigned to women by society. Society, at that time, put more emphasis on the mother and wife’s role in the family and they were to take on the responsibilities of caring for the children. Maybe if there was less work automatically assigned to them around the house and the man of the house took an equal part in those responsibilities, women could have had a fair chance at their ambitions. To me, this seems like just a result of the fear of men having more competition. If women were able to compete with them in the world outside of the house, there would be twice as many people they had to compete with. Instead, they’d rather get all the glory by having the wife stay at home and all the household duties be done for them. They just weren’t ready to share the glory, so they made up a cure for these nervous breakdowns caused by the woman’s actual stress of not just following her ambitions but having to do all the housework, care for the children, and cook for the husband. This cure would also cure them of their fear of having to share the rest of the world with women: just make them bedridden. This was no cure at all, though. Instead, it made them feel isolated and useless.
20/20 Great choice for your graphic illustration -- the perfect "yellow wallpaper."
ReplyDelete