“The Yellow Wallpaper” and Women’s Pain

Charlotte Gilman wrote her famous short story in response to her own experience having her pain
belittled and misunderstood by a male physician.

Charlotte Perkins Gilman

Gilman around 1900 via Wikimedia Commons

By: Erin Blakemore September 12, 2018 3 minutes

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The woman is ill, but nobody believes her. She sits in a room with yellow wallpaper, unable to
convince the men around her that her suffering is real. “You see he does not believe I am sick!” she
writes of her doctor husband.

That cry, uttered by the unnamed protagonist of Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s 1892 short story “The
Yellow Wallpaper,” could just as well be that of Abby Norman, author of Ask Me About My Uterus,
or Porochista Khakpour, author of Sick. Both memoirs, published this year, focus on women whose
physical symptoms are downplayed and disbelieved. And both carry uncomfortable echoes of
Gilman’s creepy story.

The tale, which follows its protagonist’s slow descent into madness as she gradually discerns a
woman trapped inside the yellow wallpaper of her sickroom, has long been heralded as a feminist
masterpiece, a cry against the silencing patriarchy. But literary scholar Jane F. Thrailkill warns against
looking too hard for those meanings in the text. Instead, she focuses on Gilman’s own insistence that
medical gender distinctions hurt female patients.

“The Yellow Wallpaper” comes from Gilman’s own struggle with a “nervous disorder,” a depression
for which she was treated by a physician named S. Weir Mitchell. It was a new diagnosis at the time,
and when physicians treated women with complaints for which they could find no obvious source,
they turned to new diagnostic techniques and treatments.
Charlotte Perkins Gilman bucked hard against her treatment and her doctor’s misogynistic reign.
Nonetheless, notes one scholar, she shared some of his views.

Mitchell was entirely interested in the body, not what women had to say about their own symptoms.
His signature “rest cure” relied on severe restriction of the body. Patients were kept completely
isolated, fed rich, creamy foods and forbidden to do any kind of activity, from reading a book to
going on a walk. “Complete submission to the authority of the physician” and enforced rest were
seen as part of the cure.

But Mitchell was no women’s specialist. In fact, writes Thrailkill, he honed his medical skills during
the Civil War, treating soldiers who became “hysterical” or developed symptoms like phantom limbs
after amputations, surgeries, and traumatic battles. As a result, Gilman was treated with what
Thrailkill calls “a model of disease articulated through experience with male bodies.” Mitchell
likened the strain of the nineteenth-century home to that of war and his female patients to vampires
who sucked the life out of everyone around them.

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Gilman bucked hard against her treatment and Mitchell’s misogynistic reign. Nonetheless, notes
Thrailkill, she shared some of his views. Like Mitchell, Gilman believed that psychological conditions
were physical ones. But she used that belief to push for equality both in medical treatment and in
life. Women’s brains are no different than men’s, she argued, and women should be able to sidestep
a stifling home life in favor of a professional career.