Neurosis - Gendered Diagnosis with Patriarchal Causes - Essay Example

2 December Neurosis: A Gendered Diagnosis with Patriarchal Causes After marriage and giving birth, Charlotte Perkins Gilman suffered from depression and turned to the famous neurologist S. Weir Mitchell for a cure. Her experience as a patient provided the primary content for her well-known short story The Yellow Wallpaper. Jane, the narrator of The Yellow Wallpaper, went through the same “rest cure.” Mitchell instructed Gilman to “never touch a pen, brush or pencil as long as she lives,” as part of her treatment (Berman 50 cited in Wiedemann 65), while John also forbid Jane to write. Gilman learned later on that marriage and motherhood caused her ailment and that writing actually helped her get better. The Yellow Wallpaper fictionalizes what Gilman thinks about society and its gender structure. This paper analyzes the speech and character of the narrator from a feminist and formalist perspective. In this story, Jane suffers from neurosis, because of the patriarchal culture that forced her to “become a woman,” and her ailment is exhibited through changes in her speech, thoughts, and behavior, as well as through the text's diverse symbols and use of irony. The patriarchal culture defines femininity in terms of subjugation, a social definition that ultimately weakens women's psychological and physical health. John treats his wife like a simpleton. He calls her “blessed little goose,” which implies that for him, she is a pet, not a person, and especially, not his equal. As a pet, John wants Jane to rest only. But constant rest does not make her feel any better. She knows what can cure her: “I sometimes fancy that in my condition if I had less opposition and more society and stimulus” (Gilman). The story, nonetheless, shows how unfortunate it is that the narrator has imbibed an inferiority complex, because of how society treats her and women in general. Jane has many good ideas that can help her feel better, yet she thinks: “John says the very worst thing I can do is to think about my condition, and I confess it always makes me feel bad” (Gilman). She has already assimilated into the patriarchal culture, which means she is not a decision-maker, but a slave. In addition, Jane cannot stand up for herself. In every argument, she lets her husband win, such as when she asks to be transferred to another room, and John does not approve of it. Instead of doing what she wants, she considers that John is right: “...he is right enough about the beds and windows and things” (Gilman). She also appreciates her husband's caring: “He is very careful and loving, and hardly lets me stir without special direction” (Gilman). This caring, however, unmasks the low view that men have for women. Men believe that women need “special direction,” in this case, male direction, which in other words, stand for male control. The Yellow Wallpaper shows that the degree of male control exerted on women is directly related to the latter's loss of physical and mental wellbeing. One of the ways that patriarchy undermines women is through its social institutions, specifically through the male-dominated medical sector. Felton argues that medicine is “politically charged” in how it views and treats hysterical women (273). Jane is aware that she is very sick, but the men in her lives deny that. She further argues that because these men are doctors, the sicker she becomes. She says: “John is a physician...perhaps that is one reason I do not get well faster” (italics provided in the text by Gilman). Aside from John, she has her brother, who is also a doctor, and they both echo the same diagnosis that she only suffers from “temporary nervous depression” (Gilman). These men disregard her opinions and these attitudes toward women prove that women in Gilman's society are not seen as equals, but as second-class citizens who cannot think and decide for themselves. John calls his wife “little girl” and puts her in a nursery, because that is what she means to him: a girl who needs constant caring and discipline. He even believes that Jane “shall be as sick as she pleases” (Gilman), thereby undermining Jane's determination to be cured. Thus, the medical institution demands obedience and not independent thinking from female patients. The patriarchal culture also promotes Weir Mitchell's “rest cure” for neurotic women, where its underlying belief is that “intellectual stimulation damages a woman physically and psychologically” (Hudock 1). The rest cure can be seen from the treatment that the narrator receives: “phosphates or phosphites... tonics, and journeys, and air, and exercise” (Gilman). This exercise, however, does not include mobility, but exercise in self-control of one's hysterical tendencies. Furthermore, John dissuades Jane from writing and thinking about her condition, as part of her treatment. The irony is that intellectual simulation is what the narrator needed to escape, even temporarily, her subjugated conditions, which could have helped her become better. Jane notes: “I think sometimes that if I were only well enough to write a little it would relieve the press of ideas and rest me” (Gilman). John does not agree with her, and as always, she follows him. Verbal irony can also be seen when John says: “He says no one but myself can help me out of it” and yet he chides his wife for her “fancies” (Gilman). He wants his wife to control herself, not because he wants her to be independent, but because he wants her to follow him, period. Hence, the rest cure consists of forcing women to also have their minds and souls take a rest too. Gilman uses several symbols that express women's imprisonment in society. Bak sees the nursery as similar to Jeremy Bentham's Panopticon (40). The Panopticon stands for the male-centered society, which Foucault describes as “a cruel, ingenious cage” (205 cited in Bak 40). Another way of seeing the nursery is that motherhood traps women too. Gilman illustrates that the nursery has “windows [that] are barred for little children.” The “little children” can also be viewed as women, who degenerated to being little children, because that is how society molded them to be. The bars, moreover, represent the inability of women to escape their society. Gilman, when she divorced her husband and left her child, faced harsh criticisms. She, too, cannot escape the gender traps of being a woman. Furthermore, these closed windows and wall rings in the nursery suggest “torture” (Scott 200). Jane feels tortured for not being free as a human being. Jane, like other women, nonetheless, strives to break free. Scott applies an ecological analysis of the yellow wallpaper. For him, the narrator's interaction with the wallpaper stands for her resistance to her environment. When Jane sees the curves that “suddenly commit suicide” and when these curves develop “two bulbous eyes” that exert a “vicious influence” (Gilman), it is an act of defiance for her environment that she cannot manifest in real life. Furthermore, the act of crying stands for women's helplessness. When the narrator says,“I cry at nothing, and cry most of the time,” she means she cries for everything that a woman is. When a woman is a mother and wife, the more she should lament, because her multiple gender roles will further subjugate her. Because of these roles, she will forever be a prisoner of men, serving their needs, as well as their children's, while society demands that women should not respond to their own needs and desires. This paper proceeds to analyzing the language that Jane uses, which exposes her decline to neurosis due to patriarchal impositions on her freedom. When the story started, the narrator seems normal, as she uses rational language, but later on, her speech patterns become briefer with shorter and fragmented paragraphs (Hudock 1). Bak describes Jane as an “artistic and articulate woman” (39). Truly, she is an art aficionado in the way that she interprets the wallpaper: “those sprawling flamboyant patterns [commit] every artistic sin...color is repellent, almost revolting” (Gilman). She uses flowery words to describe what she sees and is significantly expressive in her assessment of the wallpaper, as if it is a work of art that has gone terribly wrong. Readers learn more about Jane's character through her writing. She has a “romantic sensibility” (Hochman 95) that sharply differed from her husband's practicality. Jane says that John is ‘‘practical in the extreme’’ (Gilman). He dislikes his wife’s “imaginative power and habit of story making,” which only worsens her “nervous weakness” (Gilman). For John, all attempts of his wife to express herself through speech or writing are mere “silly fancies” (Gilman). Hochman calls this as the man's attempt to curb women's creativity, because this can empower them and lead to future revolt against their domestic responsibilities. Jane's journal eventually reveals her journey from sanity to a nervous breakdown (Hudock 1). The garden used to look “delicious,” but the horrid wallpaper transferred its ugliness to the rest of her surroundings. When she looks out to the garden, she sees “mysterious deep-shaded arbors, the riotous old-fashioned flowers, and bushes and gnarly trees” (Gilman). Horrifying shapes have replaced the garden's beauty. This way of seeing the garden indicates that she is developing disturbing thoughts. Soon, she becomes irritable and feel “positively angry with the impertinence of it and the everlastingness” (Gilman). She experiences delusions that the wallpaper is alive with “absurd, unblinking eyes” (Gilman). Then, she believes that there is a woman, later on women, who are trapped behind the wallpaper. These women “crawl” and “skulk,” which are actions that underlie their inability to move freely. These women stand for all women who experience being women, where becoming a woman means being fully unfree to achieve their potential in life. Soon, the narrator writes in broken thoughts, as fear and paranoia consume her. She writes: “I wonder -- I begin to think -- I wish John would take me away from here!” She cannot even complete her thoughts. Her mind is filled with competing ideas too, as she tries to unearth the meaning of the pattern, while projecting to John and Jennie that she is recuperating. Jane thinks: “It slaps you in the face, knocks you down, and tramples upon you” (Gilman). The behavior of the pattern resembles men's treatment of women. They also knock women down and trample on their independent spirits. Furthermore, the more Jane “reads” the patterns in the wallpaper, the madder she gets. This can be connected to the belief before that “reading” can be “dangerous” (Hochman 91). Hochman offers an interesting analysis that the narrator treats the wallpaper as text too. In this manner, she uses the wallpaper to express her imprisoned identity. When she sees a “woman stooping down and creeping about behind that pattern” (Gilman), she also sees herself in the same restrained situation. Judith Fetterley affirms this analysis and says that the narrator “seeks to express herself through paper. . . . [S]he converts the wallpaper into her text . . . [and] recognizes in [it] elements of her own resisting self” (Hochman 91). In addition, when the narrator finds the wallpaper hard to understand, she also mirrors her inexplicable condition as a woman. Suess explains this as the inability of language to fully express women's feelings and knowledge, because of the male-dominated “construction of meaning” (Tripathi 69 cited in Suess 81). What Jane cannot express, she interpreted in her actions, such as peeling the wallpaper and crawling on it. Jane also transforms her behavior from a rational and acquiescent woman to an independent-thinking, neurotic one. Before, she wanted to visit her relatives and transfer to another room. Later on, she becomes delighted in her seclusion and enjoys the wallpaper she once abhorred. She writes on her journal: “Life is very much more exciting now than it used to be” (Gilman). She finds it good for her to look forward to something. She has a mission now, as if life has had no meaning before. The wallpaper dominates her life. She can even smell it and compares it to “foul, bad yellow things” (Gilman). As the scent “creeps all over the house,” it takes over her life and she becomes obsessed in studying it. When the scent gets into her hair, it starts to control her life. That is what patriarchal culture also does to women. It pervades women's way of life, so that they can be subdued and controlled. For some time, Jane helps this woman under the wallpaper escape, because she knows how it feels to be trapped: “I pulled and she shook, I shook and she pulled...” (Gilman). The action symbolizes that women have to help each other, if they want to break free from social constraints. The struggle seems to be too much for Jane and she has ideas of suicide: “To jump out of the window would be admirable exercise, but the bars are too strong even to try” (Gilman). The situational irony is that though death can help her escape her womanhood, Jane's loyalty to her society unconsciously stops her from killing herself. She remains glued to social expectations of staying alive. Jane reaches the ultimate stage of neurosis when she unites with her illusions. She becomes the crawling woman and tells John: “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!” (Gilman). She has lost her self and now she is free. Her freedom can be inferred when she creeps over John's body in the end. Scott says: “Shirking the male-centered world outside, which places women in wifely and motherly loci, the narrator [attains the] quasi freedom of a self-made environment” (202). Jane has physically and psychologically conquered John at last. By falling into madness, she disproves the effectiveness of the Weir Mitchell therapy. And by crawling and being a mad woman, she can now leave her gendered duties behind, which dismantles the patriarchal hold of men over her. The Yellow Wallpaper depicts how society creates a mental illness like neurosis, because of its patriarchal structure. Gilman also questions patriarchal cures that make women sicker. The story also exposes how language, irony, and symbolism explore the imprisonment of women, because they turned into women according to social dictates. The Yellow Wallpaper may have a horrifying ending, but it is only only dreadful for the male society. From a feminist standpoint, Jane is free and better off as a neurotic. She conquered her patriarchal society by exclaiming the ineffectiveness of a man-made cure and completely leaving behind, a “normal” life of being a man's woman. Works Cited Bak, John S. “Escaping the Jaundiced Eye: Foucauldian Panopticism in Charlotte Perkins Gilman's `The Yellow Wallpaper.” Studies in Short Fiction 31.1 (1994): 39-46. Print. Felton, Sharon. “'The Yellow Wallpaper': Charlotte Perkins Gilman.” Studies in Short Fiction 32.2 (1995): 273-274. Print. Gilman, Charlotte Perkins. The Yellow Wallpaper. 1889. Print. Haney-Peritz, Janice. “Monumental feminism and literature's ancestral house: Another look at 'The Yellow Wallpaper'.” Women's Studies 12.2 (1986): 113-128. Print. Hochman, Barbara. “The Reading Habit and 'The Yellow Wallpaper.'” American Literature 74.1 (2002): 89-110. Print. Hudock, Amy E. “The Yellow Wallpaper.” Masterplots II: Women’s Literature Series (1995): 1-3. Print. Scott, Heidi. “Crazed Nature: Ecology in the Yellow Wall-Paper.” Explicator 67.3 (2009): 198-203. Print. Suess, Barbara A. “The Writing's on the Wall: Symbolic Orders in 'The Yellow Wallpaper.'” Women's Studies 32.1 (2003): 79-97. Print. Wiedemann, Barbara. “The Yellow Wallpaper.” Short Fiction: A Critical Companion (1997): 64-72. Print. Read More