Women’s Sufficiency and Mental Disorders

By Jordan Ross

Charlotte Perkins Gilman once said, “A house does not need a wife any more than it needs a husband.” Gilman, an author and feminist from the 19th century, argued for women's rights through her writing and had personally undergone the ‘rest cure’ treatment in her own life. In her short story, The Yellow Wallpaper, Gilman gives the reader a view of her postpartum depression through the protagonist named Jane, who is prescribed the rest cure by her own husband to supposedly heal her depression. Perkins Gilman shows the inequalities of power that devastated women in her time through symbolism of the windows in the nursery and the irony of John and his medical position.

The dramatic irony of John prescribing Jane the rest cure, as she is clearly in a mental state where she is in need of exposure, suffocates Jane even more into herself even though John is a physician. Although Jane is aware of her postpartum depression diagnosis, she becomes unsure about the treatments John is suddenly telling her to abide by, and she says, “I lie down so much now. John says it is good for me, and to sleep all I can. Indeed, he started the habit by making me lie down for an hour after each meal. It is a very bad habit, I am convinced, for, you see, I don’t sleep” (Gilman 18). Jane is diagnosed with depression rather than broken legs, and is instructed by a doctor, who did not provide her diagnosis, to stay in bed, lay down after eating, and being reassured that this is the proper thing for her. All this contributes to her isolation and loneliness. She says, "I lie down so much now," as symptoms of clinical depression include lying down, isolating, skipping out on things. Her own husband exacerbates these symptoms, and instead of letting Jane out into the world and taking things slowly with her, he isolates her as if she did something wrong. An example of how an emphasis on the physical, unlike the mental, is apparent when John forbids Jane to write; he claims that it worsens her condition because it makes her tired, and she says, “I think sometimes that if I were only well enough to write a little, it would relieve the press of ideas and rest me. . .But I can write when she is out” (Gilman 14). Jane feels as though writing provides mental comfort but her husband does not understand this, and the effort of keeping her writing hidden exhausts her more than the writing itself. She feels constrained even to keep secrets from the housekeeper as John dictates what happens around the house even though he is never there. One final example of John's poor treatment is when Jane longs for the companionship of others, specifically John and her socially stimulating relatives; Jane says, “When I get really well John says we will ask Cousin Henry and Julia down for a long visit, but he says he would as soon put fire-works in my pillow-case as to let me have those stimulating people about now” (Gilman 14). But John informs her that it will exacerbate her condition and that she should rest alone in the nursery. Of course, John is blinded by his smug physician title, to the mental threat of his wife being secluded imprisoned away from society, slipping her into lunacy. The irony continues in that John's physical shielding of his wife from social interaction only serves to deepen her psychological misery. The title and position that John holds exemplifies the dramatic irony of how unwell Jane is and how his care has a negative impact on her health and plays a role in her seemingly inevitable spiral into insanity.

The barred windows in the nursery Jane lives in symbolize an intersection between opportunity and reality. The window is one distinguishing feature of the house that represents not only her potential but also her sense of being trapped. The representation of what Jane can view out her window is the initial idea of what her life could be like; she says, “Out of one window I can see the garden, those mysterious deep-shaded arbors, the riotous old-fashioned flowers, and bushes and gnarly trees. Out of another I get a lovely view of the bay and a little private wharf belonging to the estate” (Gilman 13). Through the analysis of the outside life in comparison to the isolated, inside life that Jane is thrown into, the reader can create images of the beautiful scenery around Jane, the gorgeous trees and flowers in the green garden as well as the glistening bay that depicts what opportunity is like for white men in her time. As Jane looks out of the windows and sees beautiful landscapes surrounding her isolated, alone, trapped self as a woman, it shows how women were meant to stay at home and men were able to experience the beauties of life. The feeling of not only being trapped within the walls of society as a woman but also as a mentally ill woman living in a man's time goes to show not only how John viewed the narrator but also women as a whole. As Jane becomes so sick of staying secluded in the small place from which she is trying to escape, she says, “I am getting angry enough to do something desperate. To jump out of the window would be admirable exercise, but the bars are too strong even to try” (Gilman 21). In this quote, Gilman plainly communicates to the reader that the narrator's longing for freedom is held in her room by the bars on her window, as these bars are directly related to her relationship with John. The bars in the narrator's window act as a gothic symbol for the narrator's relationship with her husband because they both limit her independence and authority. This symbolism shows Gilman's critique of patriarchal society, as she draws attention to the physical restriction of Jane in society. This implies that Gilman blames the way matriarchy limited women's freedom and power at this time. Traditionally, windows in literature represent a vista of possibilities, but now through them, Jane sees everything she could be and have through them. But she says near the end, "I don't like to look out of the windows even if there are so many of those creeping women, and they creep so fast" (Gilman 22). She knows she has to conceal and lay low in order to be accepted by society, and she does not want to see all the other women who have to do the same as she sees them as a reflection of herself. She discusses how women must move in order to be seen in society. For her, the window does not signify a portal. She can't enter what she sees outside the window because John won't let her, but also because that world will not belong to her and she will be oppressed like all other women. She will be restrained and forced to suffocate her own speech. Through the windows in the nursery and the irony of John and his medical position, Perkins Gilman depicts the disparities of power that destroyed women in her time. The symbolism of a window, which offers a view from the outside to the inside, also represents a society in which women are not accepted due to their standing. The dramatic irony in this story highlighted the authority men have over women, both in terms of say and decision-making; not only were women unable to speak up about how they were treated, but no one with a voice did either. The Yellow Wallpaper, through Gilman's writing and