Women: Weak Neither in Mind Nor Body

Earlier yesterday evening, a friend and I were discussing the unique challenges our daughters faced as they carved out careers for themselves in what, despite great progress, continues to be a man’s world.  We concluded that they were nevertheless lucky to have so many opportunities for achievement and accomplishment as well as the freedom to exercise agency over their fate, something denied to women in the 19^th century. The discussion was reinforced by my examination of yet another work of literary fiction. This time it was an analysis of “The Yellow Wallpaper” by 19^th century writer Charlotte Perkins Gilman, leading to another wakeful early morning, (partially fueled by an overload of caffeine).

The narrator in Gilman’s story is Jane, a young woman suffering from postpartum depression. She and her husband John, a physician, are staying in a mansion for the summer as she recovers. John is a practical man who is unconcerned with  his wife’s emotional sensibilities and does not believe that she has an actual illness. Jane battles against the prevailing medical opinion which theorizes that she suffers from a tendency towards hysteria.  Her husband says that the best treatment for Jane’s anxiety is confinement in the nursery of the house, which is decorated with yellow wallpaper. Jane disagrees, believing that she needs activity, both mental and physical, to get better but her husband prevents her from any kind of work or socializing, believing the excitement will be too much for her delicate state of mind. She thinks the prescribed treatment is making her sicker, but her husband ignores her, supposedly out of love and the patronizing view that he knows what’s best for her.

The narrator keeps a journal of her thoughts, which she hides from her husband. The suppression of her needs and her will, leads Jane to slowly lose her mind. The yellow wallpaper serves as a trigger for her delusions but her husband refuses to remove it, saying that she should have the willpower to get over her apprehension.  Jane begins to see women “creeping around” behind the wallpaper and searches for a way to free them. Her exclamation at the end of the story that she has “got out at last” would have a very different connotation to modern audiences, but it symbolizes the narrator’s feeling of liberation from her repressive confinement. Although she is believed to be weak and unstable, it is Jane’s husband who faints in shock at the effects of his faulty diagnosis of Jane’s condition at the end of the story which begs the question of who the weaker sex really is.

Gilman’s story is a commentary both on the state of marriage and the perception of mental illness at the time. Psychiatry was acknowledged as a legitimate medical specialty in the early 1800s, but treatment options for the mentally ill were few, harsh and futile. There were no medications for the management of mental illness and no understanding that some illnesses might be linked to biological causes. The focus was largely on patients like Jane, who were considered to be suffering from a nervous temperament. Gilman herself suffered from postpartum depression after her daughter was born. She was subjected to a rest cure, involving long periods of bed rest and enforced inactivity under the care of Dr. Silas Weir Mitchell, so the fictional narrative draws from the author’s personal experience.  In 2005, Brooke Shields and Tom Cruise engaged in a widely publicized feud when he criticized her for taking antidepressants after the birth of her daughter, calling it irresponsible. Cruise was dismissive of Shields’s struggle with postpartum depression, claiming that “there was no such thing as chemical imbalances that need to be corrected with drugs, and that depression could be treated with exercise and vitamins.”  As a dedicated Scientologist, Cruise subscribed to its belief that psychiatry, which uses medication to treat mental illness, was not a legitimate field of medicine but merely pseudoscience.

The stigma associated with mental illness has largely disappeared as our understanding of its causes and effects have expanded. Psychiatry has made great strides towards successful diagnosis of various types of mental illness, and while treatment options have improved, there is still a lot that is unknown about side effects and the consequences of drug interactions in individual patients. The Centers for Disease Control (CDC) report that even today 11 to 20% of new mothers like Jane suffer from postpartum depression, which continues to be challenging to treat. 

Gilman’s story is also representative of the generally patronizing and patriarchal attitude of 19^th century society towards women. At the beginning of the story, when Jane expresses her reservations about the home they are staying in for the summer, she says “John laughs at me, of course, but one expects that in marriage.”  He treats her not as a grown woman, but a child, calling her “little girl” and his “blessed little goose.”  Men and women were not equal partners and women were expected to subject their individual desires and ambitions to the spheres of marriage and motherhood.

Parenthetically, the characterization of women as irrational and ruled by their unstable emotions, also emerges in Washington Irving’s “Rip Van Winkle", another 19^th century tale. Dame Van Winkle and her daughter have no role in the story except through Irving’s narrative filter. They are on opposite poles of the spectrum, representing what society considered both accepted and aberrant behavior for women.  Dame Van Winkle is characterized as a shrew who is constantly finding fault with her husband. He is a mild mannered feckless man who is always out chatting with the neighbors and helping everyone else with their work while his own home and family are neglected. When he returns from his 20 year long “nap” his daughter takes him in and cares for him, while shouldering the responsibilities of her home and family. “Rip Van Winkle” highlighted the prevailing belief of the time that women who actively defied men or questioned their actions or judgment were abnormal and a danger to the stability of the community.

Gilman advocated economic independence as a way to equalize the disparity in power between the sexes. Ironically, her solution, radical for its time, creates a different problem for the modern woman.  As increasing numbers of women enter the workforce, they are preoccupied not with the lack of mental stimulation, but with balancing the competing demands of work and family. Except in rare cases, even when they have supportive spouses, the bulk of the responsibility for running the household and caring for the children still falls on the women. 

The feeling that if they concentrate on succeeding in their careers they are somehow failing their families, causes many women to feel guilty and anxious, creating a new form of mental disturbance. In addition to their inner conflict, they are also often criticized, mostly by other women, either for choosing a full time career or for being stay at home wives and mothers. In stories like “The Yellow Wallpaper” Gilman’s ideas were radical for their time in advocating a more egalitarian role for women. However, despite more resources and greater knowledge, we have yet to find a workable solution to the problem of gender inequality.