Consequences of the Rest Cure in the 19th Century Patriarchy

        Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s short story “The Yellow Wallpaper” is widely read and studied by literary critics around the world who are interested in its origin and purpose. Feminists claim the story as their own, viewing it as a condemnation of males in general. There is much debate in the world of literature about why Gilman wrote such a shocking story. I believe that Charlotte Perkins Gilman wrote “The Yellow Wallpaper” in order to protest the rest cure and reflect the effect that the patriarchal society had on women in the arena of mental illness in the 19^th century. I will demonstrate this in an exploration of the societal expectations for women in the 19^th century, the history of mental illness, the infamous rest cure, and how all of this pertains to literature, particularly in Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper.”

 

PATRIARCHAL SOCIETY’S EXPECTATIONS FOR WOMEN

            The biggest obstacle faced by women in the 19^th century was the patriarchal control of society and the resulting demands on women. One cannot begin to understand these expectations without a discussion on the Cult of Domesticity, the ideology of which dominated society. The Cult of Domesticity emerged in 1830. According to this ideology, a woman’s sole responsibility was to be a good wife to her husband and mother to her children. She had no other purpose or role to play. The Cult of Domesticity held that only if a woman holds the following four central virtues is she considered a good wife and mother: piety, purity, submission, and domesticity. In this way alone did she have value. A pious woman has a connection with God; a pure woman guards against man’s sexual desires and keeps herself pure until marriage; a submissive woman displays complete obedience toward her husband; and a domestic woman is the perfect housewife for her husband and family. A woman was expected to be completely self-sacrificial in the home. Her “rights” centered entirely on her family, and her life was expected to reflect this. 

The current feminist movement encourages women to escape patriarchal expectations by seeking out a job as a break from the requirements of being a homemaker. Unfortunately, women in the 19^th century did not have this option. While they were permitted to have jobs, the “professions available to women in the 19^th century...seem to be nothing more than extensions of their work at home, [such as] taking care of children, maintaining a home, or nursing people back to health” (Siguröardóttir 15). Not only that, but a woman having a career was severely frowned upon because a woman was expected to take care of her family rather than to pursue her own desires to make money or a name for herself in the work force. “Women in the 19^th century were expected to fulfill their duties as wives and mothers and be content in their existence as nothing more” (Chuang 2). They were forced into their roles as wives and mothers, unsurprisingly resulting in increased emotional instability and mental illness.

            Of course, not every woman could not fit into this cookie-cutter role without losing herself. Yet a woman could be referred to a psychiatrist by her husband in the male-dominated psychiatric field if she failed to fulfill her duties. According to Siguröardóttir, women were admitted to insanity wards whenever their husbands felt that they were “stepping outside the boundaries of” their roles as women (6). In fact, women could be admitted to an asylum or be treated by a psychiatrist for nearly any reason at all, or no reason whatsoever. As Siguröardóttir wrote, “In many places a woman could be committed to an asylum or a state hospital because her husband or father demanded it, and this rarely required proof of her actual mental instability” (7). 

Women were even institutionalized for “over-education.” It was widely believed that women were not mentally capable of taking in much knowledge at all and that a woman could potentially suffer damage to her nervous system if she tried to overeducate herself. Even a woman’s appearance could sometimes serve as grounds for institutionalization. A woman’s physical appearance was consistently used to judge her mental health. Yet this was a double-edged sword – if a woman appeared sloppy and ill-groomed, she was considered mentally unstable, but if she cared too much about her appearance then she was considered vain and again referred to a psychiatrist.

            It is necessary to address that women’s lack of autonomy had nearly everything to do with this situation. The only independence women ever had was when they were very young girls. Even as such, the toys they were given to play with reflected the eventual duties they would be expected to take up, such as toy stoves and baby dolls. But as girls grew, their lives were dominated by their parents, particularly the father. They were trained from a young age to cook, clean, take care of children, and perform other household tasks in order to train them for adulthood. Once a woman was married, her care was passed from her father to her husband, and she was expected to dedicate her life to caring for him, bearing his children, and raising his family. While there is certainly merit to being a wife and mother, and much enjoyment to be had as such, women desired to have another outlet for their time and energy.

            Women could not even pour this energy into education. As noted above, “over-education” in women was cause for concern – but the definition of over-education for women was the very same as the minimal education requirements for men. Lack of education for women in the 19^th century (outside of what was considered necessary to prepare her to be an adequate wife and mother) prevented women from being able to care for themselves, thus leaving them financially dependent on their families, and eventually, their husbands. 

            According to a study of gender and women’s mental health conducted by the World Health Organization, 

Socially determined gender norms, roles and responsibilities place women, far more frequently than men, in situations where they have little control over important decisions concerning their lives. This feeling of a lack of autonomy and control over one’s life is known to be associated with depression (“Gender and Mental Health”). 

This explains why the expectations on women led to a higher prevalence of nervous disorders diagnoses in women, especially in the 19^th century. Anyone facing the level of negativity and pressure that women faced during that time cannot reasonably be expected to keep their sanity. Siguröardóttir made this point well when she wrote that “a great deal of women’s illnesses in the nineteenth century were merely the result of their oppression. Mental illness eventually became something that was expected of women by the society in which they belonged” (26). Women’s lack of autonomy, along with the high expectations placed on her in 19^th century patriarchal society, led to the literary portrayal of a woman that we see in pieces like Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper,” in which women are belittled, dismissed, quieted, oppressed, and infantilized. 

 

HISTORY OF MENTAL ILLNESS

            The 19^th century was an era of increasing scientific progress. With advancing scientific knowledge came the birth of psychiatry in the 1830s, and the understanding of mental illness began to improve. Asylums built in Victorian England became the source of national pride for their progressiveness in the area of treating mental illness. It is important to note that these mental health facilities were mainly used for middle- and lower-class patients, as upper-class patients who could afford house calls from doctors and early psychiatrists were typically treated in their own homes. According to Siguröardóttir, the new understanding of mental illness led to a social movement toward treating the mentally ill more humanely. The public perception of mentally ill people moved from “criminal, horrifying idiots” to “sick humans needing care.” Those in charge of mental health facilities stopped restraining their patients unless it was necessary and began treating them with more kindness. 

There were unfortunate consequences to this new perception, however – a public paradigm shift of the icon of madness across gender lines. “Interestingly, the popular image [representing the mentally ill] shifted from that of the bestial madman of the 18^th century to the less threatening but troubled mad-woman” (Siguröardóttir 3). This was not only due to the idea of treating patients better, as one would gently treat a sick woman, but also due to the fact that psychiatric practices were entirely male-dominated until 1894. These circumstances coupled together led to social romanticizing of mental illness in women. The very idea of beauty in a woman included the characteristics of one who was mentally ill. A mentally ill woman was glorified, even by women themselves, as “hysteria and various problems with nerves were considered to be a sign of an intellect and sensitivity which meant a better lifestyle” (Janku 16). This kind of thinking led some men to take their wives to see psychiatrists without cause and insist she was in need of psychiatric treatment, even if she was not mentally ill. 

The gender-switch of the “icon of madness” was also related to the growing diagnosis of nervous conditions that were almost entirely associated with women, such as hysteria, anorexia nervosa, and neurasthenia. Most scholars believe that Gilman’s unnamed narrator of “The Yellow Wallpaper” suffered from what is called post-partum depression (Janku 28). Yet one will notice that post-partum depression is not on the above list of diagnoses recognized within psychiatry at the time. That is because in the 19^th century, there did not yet exist a diagnosis for post-partum depression. Gilman’s narrator was thus diagnosed with hysteria and was prescribed the same cure that was prescribed to all other women with nervous illnesses – the rest cure. 

 

SILAS WEIR MITCHELL AND THE REST CURE

            The rest cure was the most infamous treatment of nervous disorders in the 19^th century. Pioneered by American physician and nerve specialist Silas Weir Mitchell, the rest cure consisted of inactivity, a fattening diet, and a restriction of all mental and physical activity. Mitchell was considered the leading psychiatrist in dealing with women’s nervous disorders. Gilman’s narrator mentioned Mitchell directly in her personal journal entries in reference to her deteriorating condition. “John says if I don’t pick up faster he shall send me to Weir Mitchell in the fall” (“Wallpaper” 136). Siguröardóttir wrote of the rest cure that the “patient was not allowed to leave bed or even move within it without the doctor’s approval” (3). Male doctors around the world, particularly in Victorian England, began to prescribe this treatment of very limited mental and physical stimuli. This type of treatment was widely believed to improve a woman’s mental health by returning her strength and giving her a break from the stimuli that was thought to have distressed her nerves. 

            However, the confinement and inactivity only deteriorated each woman’s mental and physical condition. The rest cure was at its most dangerous when the affected women were not listened to, as seen in “The Yellow Wallpaper.” When the unnamed narrator expressed her concerns that the cure wasn’t working, her husband John repeatedly told her that he, as her husband and as a physician, knew what was best for her. In her private journal, the narrator writes, “Personally I believe that congenial work, with excitement and change, would do me good. But what is one to do?” (“Wallpaper” 131-2). Each time the narrator voices her opinion, she is met with John’s insistence that “you really are better, dear, whether you can see it or not. I am a doctor, dear, and I know” (“Wallpaper” 139). This attitude, of course, is reflective of what life was really like for women who were forced to obey the rest cure. When women resisted this cure and expressed that they did not feel it was working, they were often force fed or restrained, and some even faced physical punishment for disobeying. 

            Despite all this, of course, men still insisted that they knew best. They were, after all, more educated than their wives. Moreover, men were captives of the patriarchal society just as much as women were – not in that they were oppressed, but that they held the beliefs about women that society told them to. Men truly believed that they knew better than their wives and daughters because the society they were a part of led them to believe it. 

            Although men believed they were doing what was best for their wives, there was a darker side to this rest cure. Silas Weir Mitchell wrote about his purpose for devising the rest cure in his book Fat and Blood in which he discussed the treatment in detail. Mitchell confessed that he devised the cure as a tool to “discipline women whose illness became a means of avoiding household duties” (Mitchell 200). Indeed, if it were not enough that women were cracking under the pressure of societal expectations, they were now being punished for it. The rest cure was meant to lead women to yearn for something to do, even if that only meant fulfilling her duties as a wife and mother again. The only way a woman could possibly escape from this vicious cycle is to lose herself completely. This is expressed in the “insanity is freedom” idea presented in Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper.”

 

CHARLOTTE PERKINS GILMAN AND “THE YELLOW WALLPAPER”

            As it often does, literature began to mirror reality. Gilman’s short story was not the first piece of creative literature to speak out against the patriarchal society of the 19^th century, nor would it be the last. Wilkie Collins’s Women in White, Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, and Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights were some of the many reflections of the expectations placed on women, along with the danger they faced if they did not conform. Women in these stories either survived or, more likely, drove themselves insane trying to fulfill these standards.

Naturally, however, pieces like this were incredibly difficult to get published, not only due to the nature of their content but also due to the fact that they were penned by female authors. Although only 20% of all authors from 1800 to 1935 were women, men still objected that women were “taking over literature.” Most of the rejected literary works during that time were those written by women. Those female-authored pieces that did get through the publishing process were heavily censored, removing everything that reflected any type of passion or strong feelings. Because of this, many women authors were forced to publish under pseudonyms in order to publish their pieces largely untouched. 

Charlotte Perkins Gilman was one of the many who fought against these limitations. She was born as Charlotte Anne Perkins in Connecticut in 1860, at the height of patriarchal society in America. She had a difficult childhood due to her parents’ unhappy marriage – in order to protect her children from the emotional harm and disappointment that she had faced in her marriage, Gilman’s mother refrained from showing her children much affection at all. At the age of 24, Gilman married Charles W. Stetson and gave birth to her first child a year later. She began to suffer what scholars now believe was postpartum depression; however, because there was not yet a diagnosis for post-partum depression at this time, she was diagnosed with hysteria. Gilman visited Silas Weir Mitchell himself and was, like many others, prescribed the rest cure. She followed his directions for a few months, trusting that the cure would work. However, when she realized her condition was only getting worse, she returned to her ordinary life and found her condition slowly improving. 

In 1888, Gilman realized her societal and familial expectations were the root of her depression. She divorced her husband and left her child in his care, after which she began to truly recover. Gilman wrote “The Yellow Wallpaper” in 1890 and pushed for its publication for two years before she succeeded. She faced backlash from the story, but she was not discouraged and continued to write. In 1900, she married her cousin George Houghton Gilman and began work as an early women’s rights advocate. However, Gilman was diagnosed with breast cancer in 1932, and unable to deal with the pain, committed suicide by chloroform 3 years later.

Although Gilman was a women’s rights activist, and although “The Yellow Wallpaper” is claimed as a feminist tract, Gilman never thought of the story as a feminist tool. She simply wrote it to speak out against the rest cure, not the male gender as a whole. In her essay “Why I Wrote the Yellow Wallpaper”, published in 1913, she defended her attack on the rest cure, insisting that women need meaningful work suited to their natural inclinations and abilities. Gilman wrote that after visiting Mitchell, she “went home and obeyed these directions for some three months, and came so near the border line of utter mental ruin that I could see over” (“Why I Wrote”). When she decided to ignore the physician’s direction of the rest cure and went back to work, she pinpointed the “cure” as the cause for her further nervous deterioration. Gilman wrote the story as a definitive protest against the rest cure, and even sent the story to Mitchell himself. Although she never heard back from him, Mitchell later told a colleague that the story made him reconsider the rest cure. 

The narrator of “The Yellow Wallpaper” served as a representation of Gilman’s own experience with the rest cure. The fact that the narrator remained unnamed throughout the story was perhaps symbolic of the lack of autonomy and authority that she had at the time. Another literary theory suggests that perhaps “a name would have created one concrete person; on the contrary, the anonymous heroine can represent many women” (Janku 36). Nevertheless, this nameless character reveals a struggle between two conflicting desires – her desire to fulfill her duties as a loving wife to John, as expected by her society, and her desire to be heard and listened to. The narrator repeatedly expresses to John how she feels as if she is getting worse by following the cure and is each time met with responses such as “Bless her little heart! she shall be as sick as she pleases” (“Wallpaper” 140). 

It cannot be ignored that, as noted above, the minds of men of the 19^th century were dominated by the patriarchy almost as much as women. Therefore, in the story, John should not be seen as a villain. Readers must be aware that: 

John is moving in the same reality as his wife is, obeying the rules of the patriarchy and genuinely believing that he is helping her... [he] has internalized the misogyny that is acceptable and normal in his environment, and is unaware of the harm he is doing to his wife (Siguröardóttir 19). 

Many literary critics insist that John is the villain of the story based on the narrator’s journal entry that “he does not believe I am sick!” (“Wallpaper” 131). Yet it will behoove the reader to remember that John was a physician, not a psychiatrist, and the field of psychiatry was fairly new at the time. This means he was focused solely on the physical, and because he could see nothing physically wrong with his wife’s body, he thus deemed that she was not sick. However, the fact that he did not listen to her undeniably contributed to her nervous breakdown, as “the silencing of women was without a doubt a contributor to the increase in mental illness” (Siguröardóttir 28). John strictly adheres to the rest cure, as he, too, bears the burden of his own social role. As a man, he not only has to provide for his family financially but also has to make sure that his family is alive and well. Unfortunately, this meant ensuring that his wife rigorously obeys the rest cure. His character “combines the professional authority of the physician with the legal and emotional authority of the husband,” as expressed in the very beginning of the narrator’s journal (Chuang 1). 

            As John was not a cause but rather a trigger of the narrator’s mental illness, so too was the wallpaper itself. “In a different room, the heroine could still suffer because of the carpet, or the curtains, or the bed linen, and her psychical breakdown could still be unavoidable” (Janku 31). This is because the rest cure was the true cause of her mental deterioration. The narrator herself expressed her opinion in her private journal that work would be good for her and that the rest cure was negatively impacting her mental health (“Wallpaper” 131, 132, 135, 139, 140).  Her idleness due to the rest cure is what led her to start studying the wallpaper in the first place. The worse her condition gets, the more she seems to like the paper and the more she seems to understand its pattern. Later in the story, as her condition deteriorates, she writes “I’m getting really fond of the room in spite of the wall paper. Perhaps because of the wall paper” (“Wallpaper” 137). 

            The woman that the narrator sees inside of the wallpaper “represents the heroine’s own craving for freedom” (Janku 35). The bars the woman is trapped behind are representative of the demands of the patriarchy, or more specifically, the restrictions of the rest cure. When the narrator rips the paper off the walls at the end of the story, symbolically freeing herself in her insanity, John is shocked at how debased his wife has become. Yet the narrator herself finally feels unrestricted. “I’ve got out at last, in spite of you and Jane! And I’ve pulled off most of the paper, so you can’t put me back!” (“Wallpaper” 147). This is the aforementioned idea of “insanity is freedom” – to lose her sanity was to lose the restrictions placed upon her. 

 

CONCLUSION

            In this essay, I have shown that Gilman’s entire purpose for the publication of a story as shocking as “The Yellow Wallpaper” was to protest the rest cure to which so many women fell victim. This could not have been thoroughly understood, however, without a discussion of the history of mental illness and the extent of the patriarchy in the 19^thcentury. The rest cure, as well as the patriarchal state as a whole, created an environment that was ripe for the increasing extent of nervous disorders among women due to the physical and mental oppression that they faced. Despite literary restrictions placed on female authors, literature became an avenue for women to express their concerns, and Gilman herself took advantage of this. “The Yellow Wallpaper” was written as a representation of the challenges women faced in the 19^th century, particularly in the arena of mental illness and its psychiatric treatment. 

Chuang, Vic. “‘The Yellow Wallpaper’ and role of women in 19^th century.” 8 Jan. 2014, sites.google.com/a/pccu.edu.tw/i-say-you-say/student-papers/“theyellowwall-paper”androleofwomenin19thcentury.docx.

“Gender and Mental Health.” World Health Organization, 2002, https://www.who.int/gender/other_health/genderMH.pdf. 

Gilman, Charlotte Perkins. “Why I Wrote the Yellow Wallpaper.” The New England Magazine, Oct. 1913, www.cambridge.org/core/journals/advances-in-psychiatric-treatment/article/why-i-wrote-the-yellow-wallpaper/9F0803493F9D522712BB4B31BA5CCDC2

Gilman, Charlotte Perkins. “The Yellow Wallpaper.” The New England Magazine, 1892, https://loa-shared.s3.amazonaws.com/static/pdf/Gilman_Yellow_Wallpaper.pdf. 

Janku, Veronika. “Desperate Housewives in the Late 19^th Century: Ch. P. Gilman and Her Story ‘The Yellow Wallpaper.’” Theses.cz, 2012, digilib.k.utb.cz/bitstream/handle/10563/19890/jankü_2012_bp.pdf?sequence=1. 

Mitchell, Silas Weir. Fat and Blood. Hansebooks, 2017. 

Siguröardóttir, Elisabet. “Women and Madness in the 19^th Century.” Semantic Scholar, Sept. 2013, skemman.is/bitstream/1946/16449/1/BA-ElisabetRakelSigurdar.pdf.

Wisner, Katherine L., et al. “Postpartum Depression.” The New England Journal of Medicine, vol. 347, no. 3, 18 July 2002, pp. 194-199., doi:10.1097/00256406-199818220-00001.