All too many of us have been finding that mental health can be volatile and fragile during isolation, which makes the discovery that ‘hysteria’ was once treated by enforcing isolation and inertia all the more surprising—sinister, even. Particularly in the late 18th century, a perceived epidemic of this hysteria fascinated and terrorized Western society. It is important to note that while medics did document ‘male hysteria’ and further ‘madness’ in men, hysteria was powerfully linked to the idea of femininity. The word itself derives from hystera—the ancient Greek term for womb or uterus. It is also worth noting the relationship between hysteria and spectacle. As well as the more benign narratives that center around a fictionalized hysteric, real life institutions like bedlam were popular to visit, bearing the same gristly enticement to voyeurism as a public hanging. In fact, the verisimilitude of hysterical characters has often come from semi-autobiography. This is visible among works by Virginia Woolf, Sylvia Plath, and Susanna Kaysen, but most famously in the unnamed protagonist of ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’, whose anonymity further conflates her with the writer, Charlotte Perkins Gilman.
The short story is told in first person by a woman who is confined for weeks to a room in a rented house by her physician husband as a ‘rest cure’. She must pen the story in secret, because she is banned from any emotional, physical, or intellectual stimulation. She is entrapped by a system that fancies itself paternalistic: her husband and brother are both physicians and devising a cure for her unwellness, but is really just patriarchal in its method of oppression and repression. This is embodied in ‘a colonial mansion, a hereditary estate’, which emphasises her subjugation through connotations of imperialism; is a stark reminder of the phallocentricity of inheritance, wealth, and power; and infantilises the heroine inside her ‘nursery then playroom then gymnasium’. Gilman underwent a similar confinement under her first husband on the advice of a Dr Silas Weir Mitchell, in an attempt to cure a long period of postnatal depression.
Gillian Brown states in ‘the empire of agoraphobia’ that ‘the preeminent figure of immobility for the nineteenth century is the hysteric, whose strange positions freeze normal bodily motion and activity’. This certainly resonates with the discontinuous syntax that Gilman uses: paragraphs are short, and within these paragraphs, sentences start on new lines. This emphasises the almost complete lack of direct speech: there is one paragraph that contains dialogue. The maddening John dominates this conversation with a diminishing ‘bless her little heart!’ and promises to ‘talk about it in the morning’. He never does. This immersion in the protagonists inner monologue with no external company or grounding voices is paradigmatic of the character’s own isolation. Brown’s description also encapsulates the static inertia that isolation entails for the supposedly hysterical narrator. However, the symbol for the fragile female psyche has traditionally been liquescent and malleable, not frozen or immobile as Brown suggests: ‘Water is the profound symbol of the liquid woman, whose eyes are so easily drowned in tears, whose body is a repository of blood, amniotic fluid, and milk.’, according to Elaine Showalter. One only has to look to the prominence of death by drowning to substantiate this: from Shakespeare’s girlish ingenue Ophelia to Hardy’s transgressive, passionate Eustacia to the first versions of Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina. These three literary suicides illuminate the conventional relationship between the tortured female psyche, which we would now recognise as mental illness, and the emblem of fluidity. The pattern on the yellow wallpaper, which the narrator develops a kind of monomania towards, has both the connectivity and changeability of Showalter’s idea and the static disjointment of Brown’s: ‘each breadth stands alone, the bloated curves and flourishes go waddling up and down in isolated columns of fatuity. But, on the other hand, they connect diagonally, and the sprawling outlines run off in great slanting waves of optic horror’ and ‘it changes as the light changes’. The immobility that Brown depicts seems more accurate to the experience of a hysterical woman undergoing the rest cure, forced into stillness. But the wallpaper, just as it is both static and fluid, embodies this attempt to cure hysteria as much as it does the hysteria itself. More than embodying them both, it binds the two into one: the narrator has long suspected that ‘PERHAPS [John being her physician] is the reason [she] does not get well faster’, and ‘believe[s] that congenial work, with excitement and change, would do [her] good’. The wallpaper has become the central locus of her hysteria as she fixates on it to a crazed degree; but she also views the paper as a constraint, coming to identify with the figures that she perceives to be ‘trapped’ behind the continuous pattern. The wallpaper symbolizes both her fluid internal world of hysteria and the static external confines of the rest cure.
But in addition to amalgamating the traditional symbol of insanity with the trendy contemporary one, Gilman further defies the conventions of genre. Julia Kristeva argues that ‘Freud’s statement ‘the hysteric suffers from reminisces’ sums up the large majority of novels produced by women’ in her work ‘oscillation between power and denial’. But in ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’, there is only one fleeting lapse into nostalgia as the narrator ‘remember[s] what a kindly wink the knobs of our big, old bureau used to have, and there was one chair that always seemed like a strong friend’. The story is focused excruciatingly on the present, where there is nothing to focus on by design. This gives rise to the constant and detailed descriptions of the wallpaper, for lack of other stimulation. The story presents itself as one of female hysteria, but it is actually one of female repression in the rest cure, focusing not on the fluid, connective reminisces of narrative that we would come to expect, but on the stark, clinical and unpleasantly present confinements around her.
Loathe as I am to defend that any good has come from barbaric confinement to inertia in one room, which Gilman underwent, we can be thankful that she managed to take up a pen in secret and give us the first truthful, telling account of the isolating rest cure; countering the male voices that pathologized hysteria- in women, in their writing -and argued for their silence and passivity. Gilman’s short story created a new perspective through which to read ‘hysteric’ novels, which Julia Kristeva might argue to include women’s writing itself, a perspective that resonates to this day.
