“The Yellow Wallpaper” and the Subjugation of Women in 19th Century Psychiatry

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Haley Lynn Shoemaker
Senior Seminar
Spring 2013
“The Yellow Wallpaper” and the Subjugation of Women in nineteenth century psychiatry
“The women of the early twentieth century… found themselves
surrounded by inescapable emotional and intellectual contradictions… That most
women managed to maintain a modicum of sanity within this hostile social
environment is one of the still largely unsung miracles of the twentieth
century…”1
In nineteenth century America, “a new disease had dawned on the medical horizon.”
Doctors diagnosed thousands of patients with “nervous disorders,” “nervous exhaustion,”
“neurasthenia,” and a host of similarly-named ailments.2 Both men and women were diagnosed,
but the concept of nervous disease was inherently gendered. Diagnoses of nervous disorders and
the new language of pathology were used as a sanction to reinforce and maintain rigid gender
roles through fear and coercion. Charlotte Perkins Gilman struggled for most of her life with
clinical depression. Her defiance of the restrictions placed on women was pathologized, and her
illness was used to oppress and silence her. The threat of neurasthenia was not the disease itself,
but rather the treatment that was administered, and it was this treatment from which Gilman
sought to save people. She based “The Yellow Wallpaper” on her own struggle with post-partum
depression, an experience which nearly drove her mad. The story, told through the journal of the
1 Bram 1Dijkstra, Evil Sisters, pg. 283.
2 This newfound epidemic was described using the burgeoning taxonomy of psychiatry,which was complex, variable
and at times even contradictory, as the new terms were often used without clear distinctions or precise definitions.
Despite this, a central theme permeated the literature: nerve disorders were caused by a lessening of the vital force of
the nerves, and the remaining energy of the nerves had to be carefully rationed and maintained. These “nerve
disorders” included: “hysteria,” a term which was applied to many symptoms ranging from simple anxiety or
masturbation to delusions and hallucinations; “nervous prostration,” which we now call depression; and
“neurasthenia,” a general term for any disorder of the nerves.

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narrator, took Gilman’s audience deep inside the mind of the “nervous woman,” forcing them to
experience this “cure” firsthand while making her narrator’s madness immediate, undeniable,
and terrifyingly relatable. Her decision to structure her indictment in this way was fundamental
to its lasting impact. By challenging medicine’s chauvinistic maltreatment of women through the
voice of a madwoman, Gilman reclaimed the language of pathology which had previously been
used to silence and discredit her. She reversed the dynamic of oppression in which disease was
used as a mechanism for social control and made it instead into a tool of social critique; she did
this by shifting the cause of madness from an internal weakness of the patient to the inhuman
treatment of the doctor.
During the nineteenth century, terms of pathology and illness were utilized to control
women and ensure the continuation of the status quo. Diagnoses of nervous disorders grew
explosively in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. This was due in part to the vast number of
symptoms which were attributed to these maladies. For example, George Beard, the physician
who “discovered” nervous exhaustion, provided a list of symptoms by which his fellow
practitioners could recognize the disease; this list encompassed nearly two pages, and Beard
noted repeatedly that it was not exhaustive.3 Nervous ailments became so widespread that by the
early nineteenth century they accounted for 2/3 of disease!4 From its inception, the very concept
of nerve disease carried fallaciously gendered presumptions. Consider the most infamous
diagnosis of the time, “hysteria.” This term was derived from the Greek word for uterus, hystera,
and was originally used to refer to diseases caused by the womb, which was believed to “float”
around inside the body. During the Enlightenment, physicians began to use the term “hysteria” to
3 George M. Beard, American Nervousness: Its Causes and Consequences,University of Chicago Digital
Preservation Collection (G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1881).
4 Peter Melville Logan, Nerves and Narratives : a Cultural History of Hysteria in Nineteenth-century British Prose,
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997).

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refer to mental ailments rather than physical ones, but these mental ailments, such as depression,
anxiety and insomnia, were still associated with women.5 Women were considered more
susceptible to nervous maladies, and were also more likely to be diagnosed with them.
Furthermore, when men did receive this diagnosis, they were characterized as “womanly” or
“feminine.” Femininity itself became associated with illness. This is not to suggest that
physicians knowingly decided to misdiagnose patients in order to silence them. Instead, the
forefathers of psychiatry carried misconceptions and preconceived notions about gender into
their emerging field; these unconscious and unchallenged prejudices had been a part of medical
thought since the time of Hippocrates. The stereotype-laden theories of these men were in turn
treated as scientific facts: “scientific commitment to fact seems to have been pliable with regard
to the nature of women… the standard for admission as fact was not high… [and] observable fact
seems at times to have been malleable to preconceptions.”6 Moreover, while the “scientific
commitment to fact” may have been “pliable” on the subject of women, the veneration of those
who understood the seemingly miraculous new frontiers of science was absolute and
unwavering. The opinions of physicians about women were highly respected and often repeated,
and a “relentlessly repeated fiction all too often becomes a social reality in the long run.”7 Also,
the conservation of gender norms took on a sudden sense of urgency following the publication of
Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of the Species in 1859. The laws of evolution where
theoretically applied to society, and this generated waves of scientific concern for the future of
the “civilized” and superior Caucasian race. This anxiety was especially acute with regards to a
woman’s ability to parent. Childbirth and motherhood were considered central to women’s lives,
5 Peter Melville Logan, Nerves and Narratives, pg. 23.
6 Cynthia Eagle Russett, Sexual Science,pg. 184.
7 Bram Dijkstra, Evil Sisters: the Threat of Female Sexuality and the Cult of Manhood (New York: Alfred A. Knopf,
1996), pg. 284.

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though comparable phases of men’s lives were peripheral, and “motherhood was, in essence, her
sole contribution to society… She had no other gift to offer but her healthy-and numerous-
offspring.”8 9 G. J. Baker-Bensfield explained the consequences of allowing gender roles to shift
by quoting Dr. Amariah Brigham’s highly influential Remarks on the Influence of Mental
Cultivation on Health: “in woman, the ‘nervous system naturally predominates’…women’s
nervous systems overloaded by mental excitement would have ‘deplorable effects upon their
offspring.’ Unless women were directed back to a focus on the body, the United States would
experience ‘dangerous consequences…’ Similarly, women who suffered from nervous disease
were substandard mothers, and could even pass this disease to their children. The implication in
Brigham, that women were responsible for the health and sanity of American Society, derived
from the same assumptions as those behind the separation of spheres generally… Men needed to
assume that women were the source of their society’s curable insanity.” 10 The logical conclusion
of this reasoning was that women were the cause of nerve disease as well as its preferred victim.
Women who ventured outside of the stiflingly narrow confines of Victorian acceptability,
particularly educated women, were more vulnerable to nervous disease, and if afflicted, they
were held responsible for their illness.11 Even the uneducated woman could put herself in danger
by merely reading material which was too “stimulating.” Physicians opposed novel reading
because “there was little doubt that such reading habits injured… the mind.”12 Women were
similarly responsible for avoiding nerve disorder; it was a popular medical opinion that only by
8 L. J. Jordanova, Sexual Visions :Images of Gender in Science and Medicine between the Eighteenth and Twentieth
Centuries, (Madison,Wisconsin: University of Wisconsin Press,1989), pg. 15.
10 Dr. Amariah Brigham, Remarks on the Influence of Mental Cultivation on Health (Hartford, 1832), as quoted in
Barker-Benfield, G. J., The Horrors of the Half-known Life : Male Attitudes toward Women and Sexuality in
Nineteenth-century America,(New York: Harper & Row, 1977), pg. 54-5.
11 John S. Haller, The Physician and Sexuality in Victorian America, pg. 37.
12 Ibid, 133.

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confining herself to the home circle that a woman could secure herself against the threat of
neurasthenia.13 Educating women was thought to be a terrible risk; highly educated women had
fewer children, presumably due to the fact that “[m]anly pursuits by women, such as higher
education, lessened those sexual and maternal instincts so important to the perpetuation of the
species.”14 Their doctors believed that if Caucasian women were educated and consequently had
fewer children, this would lead to the decline of their race and the subsequent downfall of
society. These were the reasons why a tool such as the peril of psychosis was needed to conserve
normative gender roles. A diagnosis of nervous disease provided a convenient means to silence
any women who challenged the rigidly defined sex roles of the Victorian age by branding them
as fundamentally corrupted, because “the very concept of pathology is a line drawn between the
‘good’ and the ‘bad.’”15 Rebellious women were “diagnosed” with some form of nerve disorder,
which discredited their opinions and undermined their cause. Their struggle against societal
oppression was made to seem symptomatic of their disease, and this changed the perceived cause
of their rebellion from the external pressures of an unjust society to an illness or weakness inside
the mind of the troublesome woman. Furthermore, this pathologization of dissent was a potent
incentive for other women to conform exactingly to Victorian standards of social acceptability to
avoid a similar fate, because “the most elementally frightening possibility is loss of control over
the self…[and] the mad are perceived as the antithesis to the control and reason that define the
self.”16 The nebulous nature of neurasthenia only strengthened the threat it posed, because “in the
13 Ibid, 33.
14 Ibid, 61.
15 Sander L. Gilman, Difference and Pathology:Stereotypes of Sexuality,Race, and Madness (Ithaca: Cornell
University Press,1985), pg. 23.
16 Sander L. Gilman, Difference and Pathology,pg. 23-4.

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absence of firm parameters or fixed boundaries, it is likewise ‘impossible’ to orient oneself
definitively in relation to madness… inside/outside, sane/insane, self/other.”17
“In the long, slow development of our social consciousness, Charlotte Perkins Gilman…
gleamed like a torch.”18 She was an author, an essayist, a lecturer, a persuasive and prolific
advocate of equality for women. Her works were “searching critiques of the social forces that
distort and stunt the lives of women,” and have remained fresh, compelling and all too relevant
in the century since they were written19. She was born in 1860 in New England to the Beecher
family.20 Her father abandoned her family when she was young. Gilman’s mother was rarely
affectionate, and so their relationship was distant. In her autobiography, Gilman wrote that this
coldness was a misguided attempt to prevent her daughter being hurt as she had been by her
husband’s departure.21 Gilman’s single mother relied on relatives to take them in, and frequent
relocation and transfers between schools left Gilman with a fragmented education. Nevertheless,
she was naturally bright, and she augmented her unfinished formal education with endless
reading, encouraged and guided through correspondence with her father, a published author and
librarian. Her letters to her father began to mention a persistent depression from about the age of
15. 22
As a young woman, Gilman yearned to be free from her overbearing mother. She was
already a dedicated feminist, and had decided not to marry. She treasured hopes of living as a
single independent woman, and she wanted to be able to focus completely on her work. Instead,
17 Chris Wiesenthal, Figuring Madness in Nineteenth-century Fiction (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1997), pg. 16.
18 Zona Gale in the Foreword to Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s The Living of Charlotte Perkins Gilman: An
Autobiography,(Madison,Wisconsin:The University of Wisconsin Press, 1990), pg. xxvii.
19 Cynthia Eagle Russett, Sexual Science:the Victorian Construction ofWomanhood, (Cambridge, Massachusetts:
Harvard University Press, 1989), pg. 13.
20 H. L. Horowitz, Wild Unrest: Charlotte Perkins Gilman and the Making of “The Yellow Wall-Paper,” (Oxford
University Press,USA, 2010), pg. 1.
21 Charlotte Perkins Gilman, The Living of Charlotte Perkins Gilman, pg. 10-1.
22 H. L. Horowitz, Wild Unrest, pg. 3-6.

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she met Charles Walter Stetson in January of 1882, and the two began dating. By the first of
January of 1884, Gilman began to express fear and hopelessness about her future with Stetson.
She wrote about her many misgivings and her sadness over the loss of her work, and yet it was as
though she had no choice but to live out the traditional domestic life she had never wanted. She
married Stetson the following May.23 Of her marriage, Gilman wrote that she was happy, except
for an increasing depression that she suffered from more and more often.24 Gilman’s only child,
Katherine, was born on March 23rd, 1885, and was closely followed by “nervous prostration,”
which would today be called postpartum depression. This made Gilman’s illness and her sense of
powerlessness still worse: “I would hold her close-that lovely child!-and instead of love and
happiness, feel only pain… Nothing was more utterly bitter than this, that even motherhood
brought no joy.”25 This is strikingly similar to the words of the narrator in “A Yellow
Wallpaper:” “Such a dear baby! And yet I cannot be with him, it makes me so nervous.”26 While
there is little doubt that she suffered from a real mental illness, this physical disorder was
inextricably tangled with the “disease” projected on her by her society. Furthermore, in that
society, postpartum depression was an incomprehensibly harrowing burden. Since a woman’s
only value was derived from motherhood, a woman who could not mother was worthless.
Gilman also felt responsible for her own illness, as her diary clearly showed: “Prominent among
the tumbling suggestions of a suffering brain was the thought, ‘You did it yourself! You did it
yourself! No good as a wife, no good as a mother, no good at anything. And you did it
yourself!’27 Still worse, many physicians would have agreed with her, because she educated
23 Charlotte Perkins Gilman, The Living of Charlotte Perkins Gilman, pg. 84.
24 Charlotte Perkins Gilman, The Living of Charlotte Perkins Gilman, pg. 87-8.
25 Charlotte Perkins Gilman, The Living of Charlotte Perkins Gilman, pg. 88, 90-1.
26 Charlotte Perkins Gilman, “The Yellow Wallpaper,” The Harcourt Brace Casebook Series in Literature (Harcourt
Brace & Company, 1998) pg. 15.

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herself by reading and wished to live outside of societal restrictions. Finally, Gilman’s
relationship with her own mother had left her with strong opinions about motherhood; she
believed that “the first duty of a mother is to be a mother worth having.”28 Given that she was
suffering from a debilitating mental illness that she felt responsible for, Gilman likely didn’t feel
that she was such a mother. “One could say that Gilman resolved the conflict by giving herself
no choice but to repudiate the woman’s role-she became too crazy to mother. Gilman presents
herself… as unfit for… the conventional role of wife and mother.”29
Gilman sought the help of Dr. S. W. Mitchell of Philadelphia, an eminent nerve
specialist. Mitchell treated Gilman for a month with the rest cure. This cure included: a policy of
rest so strictly enforced that a nurse had to move any patient who wished to turn over in bed;
massages which were severe enough to raise body temperature; forced meals every two hours
which consisted of malt extract, raw beef, butter, and wine; rectal insertions of cod liver oil, and
iron concealed in the patient’s food. Gilman would have been completely isolated from any
outside contact, and both the nurse and masseuse were forbidden from speaking to her, which
meant that for that month she could speak only to her doctor.30 Dr. Mitchell could not have been
a sympathetic ear for Gilman. He was a patronizing and paternalistic man who believed that “the
man who does not know sick women does not know women.”31 He expanded even further upon
this view, writing that “the American woman is, to speak plainly, physically unfit for her
duties… 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
28 Ibid, 153.
29 Ann J. Lane, The Living of Charlotte Perkins Gilman, pg. xxii.
30 H.L. Horowitz, Wild Unrest: Charlotte Perkins Gilman and the Making of“The Yellow Wall-Paper,” (Oxford
University Press,USA, 2010), pg. 127.
31 S.W. Mitchell, Doctor and Patient,(Lippincott, 1887), pg. 10.

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to share with the man?32 Clearly, Gilman could not have spoken honestly to him at all, to say
nothing of confiding in him. Eventually, Dr. Mitchell pronounced her healthy in body and sent
her home. Her instructions were to rest regularly, limit her intellectual life, spend time with her
child, focus on her domestic duties, and “never touch pen, brush or pencil as long as you live.” 33
Gilman followed his prescription faithfully for months, and she later wrote: “[I] came perilously
near to losing my mind. The mental agony grew so unbearable that I would sit blankly moving
my head from side to side-to get out from under the pain… I made a rag baby, hung it on a
doorknob and played with it. I would crawl into remote closets and under beds-to hide from the
grinding pressure of that profound distress…”34 Again, the parallel to her fictitious character can
be seen: the narrator in the story was forbidden from working, though she confided that she
thought work would improve her condition; she fixated on an inanimate object and
anthropomorphized that object to feel less alone; and in the end she was reduced to crawling
around in distress. 35
After years of struggle, Gilman and Stetson agreed to separate and seek a divorce in the
fall of 1887, though they remained amicable.36 For several years, Gilman’s daughter Katherine
lived with her. When Katherine was nine, Gilman sent her to live with Stetson. Stetson had
married Grace Channing, a close friend of Gilman’s, with Gilman’s blessing. Gilman’s reasons
for sending Katherine to Stetson reflected her own uncertainty about her maternal abilities and
the oppression of her gender: “there was new work opening for me in San Francisco, but in a
place unsuitable for a child… [s]ince her second mother was fully as good as the first, better in
32 S.W. Mitchell, Wear and Tear, or, Hints for the Overworked, (Lippincott, 1872), pg. 39.
33 H.L. Horowitz, Wild Unrest, pg. 128.
34 Charlotte Perkins Gilman, The Living of Charlotte Perkins Gilman, pg. 95-6
35 Charlotte Perkins Gilman, “The Yellow Wallpaper.”

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some ways perhaps; since the father longed for his child and had a right to some of her society;
and since the child had a right to know and love her father… this seemed the right thing to do…
This, however, was entirely overlooked in the furious condemnation which followed. I had
‘given up my child.’”37
Gilman rose from her failed first marriage into a career as a successful author and
lecturer, “appropriating the prerogatives, privileges, and successes of male selfhood.”38 She
wrote “The Yellow Wallpaper” in 1890. She submitted it first to a friend, Mr. Howells, at the
Atlantic Monthly. When Howells tried to have the story published, however, the editor sent it
back to her with this note:
Dear Madam,
Mr Howells has handed me this story.
I could not forgive myself if I made others as miserable as I have made myself!
Sincerely yours,
H. E. Scudder39
Gilman sent “The Yellow Wallpaper” to an agent who offered it to New England
Magazine,40 and it was published in their January issue in 1892.41 Many readers, most of whom
were men, wrote letters in reaction to the story. One letter appeared in the Boston Evening
Transcript questioned the wisdom of allowing the story to appear in public, and whether it
should be “allowed to pass without protest, without severest censure.”42 Gilman was asked so
often why she wrote the story that she published an article called “Why I Wrote ‘The Yellow
38 Ann J. Lane, The Living of Charlotte Perkins Gilman, pg. xxii.
41 H.L. Horowitz, Wild Unrest, pg. 189.
42 Ibid.

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Wallpaper.’” In this article, she explains that the story “was not intended to drive people crazy,
but to save people from being driven crazy, and it worked.”43 She felt that her “treatment” by Dr.
Mitchell had driven her from sadness to near insanity, and she hoped to persuade him and other
physicians to change their methods of treatment. She even sent a copy to Dr. Mitchell, though
she received no response.44
In January of 1932, after a long and successful career and a happy second marriage,
Gilman discovered that she had breast cancer. Though throughout her years of depression,
Gilman had never expressed a desire to commit suicide, upon learning of her illness she began
preparing to euthanize herself, writing in her autobiography that “I have preferred chloroform to
cancer.” Charlotte Perkins Gilman took her own life on August 17, 1935.45
“The Yellow Wallpaper” is a first person account told through the forbidden journal of a
nameless young woman who is afflicted with postpartum depression. Her husband John is a
physician, and he takes her to the country to give her the “rest cure” invented by S. W. Mitchell.
The narrator is confined to an eerie old upstairs nursery which has barred windows, rings in the
walls and floor, and a yellow wallpaper “committing every artistic sin.”46 Like Gilman, she is
barred from writing, yet she keeps a journal in secret. In it, she records her mounting obsession
with the wallpaper. She begins to see figures lurking within the pattern. She tries to tell her
husband, but he says only that “a nervous weakness… is sure to lead to all manner of excited
fancies.47 John then threatens to send her to Dr. Mitchell, and so the narrator falls silent. She
begins to see a woman creeping within the paper. The design of the paper begins to look like
43 Charlotte Perkins Gilman, “Why I Wrote ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’,” The Forerunner, October 1913.
44 H.L. Horowitz, Wild Unrest, pg.
45 Charlotte Perkins Gilman, The Living of Charlotte Perkins Gilman, pg. 335. This final quote is from her suicide
letter, which is included in the final chapterof her autobiography.
46 Charlotte Perkins Gilman, “The Yellow Wallpaper,” pg. 15.
47 Ibid, pg. 16.

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bars, similar to the bars on her windows. The woman within the pattern “just takes hold of the
bars and shakes them hard. And she is all the time trying to climb through.”48 In a crowning
example of incompetence, her husband interprets her excited fixation on the wall covering as a
sign of improvement. The narrator decides to free the woman from the wallpaper. She locks
herself in the nursery overnight when her husband is gone overnight and peels yards of it off of
the walls. By morning, the narrator believes that she has escaped from the paper herself. John
returns and breaks down the door, and the narrator says “I’ve pulled off most of the paper, so you
can’t put me back!”49 He faints at the sight of her, and she carries on creeping in circles, crawling
over his body each time.
Gilman was contributing to a greater stream of narrative discourse when she wrote “The
Yellow Wallpaper.” Following the sudden increase in diagnoses, short stories centered on
nervous protagonists became a common method of social criticism. 50 Using insanity as a
storytelling device allowed authors to “respond to issues of the day, point out societal
hypocrisy… [and] allow the characters and themselves to experience safely that which could not
be done so in reality.”51 So, the narrator of “The Yellow Wallpaper” could be safely driven mad
by her treatment without a real woman needing to suffer to prove the same point. Madness a
particularly effective approach to examine issues of gender: “the language used by many
nineteenth-century novelists to discuss and demonstrate gender issues was couched in a
vocabulary of insanity, since no other vocabulary seemed adequate to reflect the conflict and
turmoil manifest in these personal issues.”52 In fact, any character written to be mad
48 Ibid, 24.
49 Charlotte Perkins Gilman, “The Yellow Wallpaper,” pg. 27.
50 Peter Melville Logan, Nerves and Narratives, pg. 2.
51 Robert J. G. Lange, Gender Identity and Madness in the 19th Century Novel, (Edwin Mellen Press, Lewiston, NY,
2009) pg. 113.
52 Robert J. G. Lange, Gender Identity and Madness in the 19th Century Novel, Introduction.

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automatically had a backstory, told or untold, about the societal and personal conditions which
created its madness. Using psychosis to advance narrative was also problematic, however: “This
is… a self-canceling narrative, because the narrator’s authority to speak is compromised by the
nervous disease that the story reveals… [it] immediately identifies the speaker as a medical
object… It demands treatment, not attention… this narrative asks only to be made to disappear,
regardless of what it might say.”53 In “The Yellow Wallpaper,” Gilman avoided these narrative
pitfalls in two ways: first, she made the madness a direct result of the treatment the narrator had
been given, which meant that the madness itself became an indictment of the rest cure, rather
than a reason to disregard the story’s message; second, she fashioned the narrative voice to be
unwaveringly calm and lucid. Rather than allowing madness to compromise her narrator’s
reliability, Gilman reflected that madness onto the object of her narrator’s fascination: “the
eponymous yellow wallpaper functions as a screen onto which the madness and frustration
which is so markedly absent from the calm and coherent narrative is projected.”54 For her victim,
she created an eloquent, composed woman who willingly received treatment for “nervousness,”
and that same tranquility rendered the protagonist impossible to dismiss or discount. The story
repeatedly emphasized that the narrator trusts her husband and physician to make her well
despite her misgivings, and it was ultimately that trust which led to her downfall. Gilman created
a scenario in which she took the vocabulary of illness which had been used both to subjugate and
to blame women and reclaimed it for women by shifting the burden of responsibility from the
patient to the doctor. She then used that madness to “free” her protagonist, because in insanity
she could no longer be restrained, repressed, or most of all, “treated.” This reclamation of the
lexicon of illness and pathology robbed nervous disease of its power to silence women. Instead,
53 Peter Melville Logan, Nerves and Narratives, pg. 29-30.
54 Chris Wiesenthal, Figuring Madness in Nineteenth-century Fiction (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1997), pg. 9.

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she used this language to refute the marginalization of women through disease. It also
transformed dissent from a cause or symptom of illness to a reasonable response in the face of an
ineffectual and disastrous therapy.
Gilman elected to end the story with a powerfully symbolic image, that of the narrator
creeping bestially on the floor. Throughout history, women have often been compared to
primitive savages, and this idea was incorporated into psychiatric discourse.55 Women were
considered “less emancipated from nature than were men, their ‘processes’ more unconscious;
they often appeared ‘volatile and desultory.’”56 Women were instructed to control themselves
strictly to avoid giving in to their unevolved nature. This is exemplified in “The Yellow
Wallpaper,” as the narrator’s husband instructs her several times that she must control her
nervous temperament.57 If women, and the men who cared for them, did not remain vigelant, the
consequences were dire: “everyone knew that women who had reawakened the beast were
doomed to slide back down the evolutionary ladder until they reached the hunting grounds of
primitive humanity… Men who failed to domesticate such ‘creatures’ were doomed to end up
degenerate… these bestial, primal women’s abject entourage.” 58 This is the fate John suffers
after his imaginatively literal downfall, at which time he is overcome by the narrator’s wanton,
animalistic hysteria. Gilman turned this oppressive stereotype to her advantage as well, by
fashioning a setting in which the paternalistic treatment of the husband caused the dreaded
narrator’s ruin. She also reclaimed the “savage woman” archetype by portraying that
primordiality as an escape from confinement and oppression into liberty, as an ascendency into
57 Charlotte Perkins Gilman, “The Yellow Wallpaper,” pg. 14; 16; 19; 21.
58 Bram Dijkstra, Evil Sisters, pg. 84; 101

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autonomy. In this way, Gilman further diminished the shame and powerlessness associated with
madness.
The nineteenth century was a time of cultural turmoil, and this turbulence was expressed
in part through the sudden mass diagnosis of nerve disorders. These disorders were often a brand
to mark those women who could not or would not conform and a silencing tactic. Charlotte
Perkins Gilman was duly classified and suppressed in this manner when she most needed both
acceptance and medical care, and she was nearly driven mad. She wrote “The Yellow
Wallpaper” hoping to prevent other women from having to endure a similar fate, and in doing so
she reimagined the conceptual framework of illness as a condemnation of the oppressive
prejudices which created it. While Gilman could not single-handedly stop the subjugation of
women via pathologization, her work was a beacon of radical discord, a refusal to be diagnosed
rather than heard, and this refusal offered reassurance to those others being driven crazy by this
frantic cultural pursuit of sanity. “The Yellow Wallpaper” echoes a sentiment that Gilman
embodied throughout her life: “women have always transfigured their conditions-when these
didn’t kill them, body or soul.”59
59 Zona Gale, The Living of Charlotte Perkins Gilman, pg. xxxix.

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