Waiting Rooms: Feminine Medical Neglect in ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’

Hierarchies have permeated all aspects of society. They are an accepted fact, a foundation on which we have lain the bricks of modern life, and they cement our belief in a well-functioning world. However, some hierarchies come at a great detriment, and they seep into disciplines meant to uphold values of objectivity and inclusivity. One such example, illustrated vividly by Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s almost autobiographical “The Yellow Wallpaper”, is of male superiority. The text criticizes a sexist abuse of power pervasive in what should be objective medical fields. It is an appalling dominant power structure where privileged male doctors belittle concerned women, dismiss genuine ailments, and prescribe ineffective treatments in a toxic cycle that inevitably fails to cure mental illness, and instead perpetuates it. This blatant disregard for mental illness provides revelational insight for readers into the fallibility of even the most respected authorities, and Gilman’s nameless narrator suffers what could have been an avoidable descent into insanity as a result of profound medical neglect. 

One theme repeated in ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’ is that of perpetual disbelief. The protagonist attempts to question her diagnosis and treatment, but is consistently shushed and placated like a fretful child. A significant contributing factor to this is that she is surrounded by male doctors. Her brother and husband are both practicing, and though these are people she should be intimately close and secure with, her illness is dismissed by both: “If a physician of high standing, and one's own husband, assures friends and relatives that there is really nothing the matter with one but temporary nervous depression-a slight hysterical tendency-what is one to do?” (2). This resigned statement reveals a systematic dismantling of the narrator’s credibility to dwindling support systems. John’s respectable status of doctor, universally considered a rational profession, coupled with male authority lends to his assurances a kind of validity that his wife simply does not possess. Therefore, she is painted as a nervous creature prone to hysterics, and her loved ones are unable to view her outside this lens. She is thus deprived of a sympathetic confidant. And yet this subtle manipulation does not end at how others perceive the narrator; John does an excellent job at making the narrator doubt herself. The story is littered with offhand remarks about her nervous disorder, and she seems to increasingly believe in it as if a result of an adverse placebo effect. For instance, her statement, “I get unreasonably angry with John sometimes. I'm sure I never used to be so sensitive. I think it is due to this nervous condition” (2) implies a blind acceptance of John’s conclusion. The narrator herself has succumbed to the male doctor’s air of believability, and cannot grasp that she may be upset with John on his own merit, aside from her ailments. John too persistently reminds of her alleged frivolity, as with the proclamation, “Bless her little heart!... she shall be as sick as she pleases!” (5). Constant reinforcement of the false idea that she is choosing to be ill further undermines her own credibility, to herself and others, and it is thus unsurprising that she deteriorates beneath ceaseless belittlement. 

The narrator also happens to be a new mother exhibiting advanced depressive symptoms, which nowadays would be attributed to hormone-induced postpartum depression. In other words, a biological reaction outside of her control, and a legitimate illness. And yet she is still dismissed with the label of typical female hysteria. Repeated remarks of this nature, such as a scathing, “...you will never for one instant let that idea enter your mind! There is nothing so dangerous, so fascinating, to a temperament like yours” (5), discourage the patient from expressing malaise honestly, for her truths are dismissed as fantasy. The resulting conditioned silence contributes to her worsening state in two ways. First, the narrator grows to distrust her caregivers, shown with, “He asked me all sorts of questions, too, and pretended to be very loving and kind. As if I couldn't see through him!” (6). Jenny and John are her only real socialization agents, and thus she withdraws into an even more extreme isolation. This counterproductive albeit understandable defense worsens her depression, and adds to a festering sense of paranoia that erupts into her eventual wallpaper obsession. Her insistence that Jenny can’t stop looking at the wallpaper (5) could be interpreted as both a half-delusional comprehension and dislike that Jenny is always watching her. The narrator later comes to recognize herself as the woman trapped behind the wallpaper, so her mania surrounding Jenny or John’s interest in it is can be considered a severe case of projection. The second result of the protagonist’s withholding is that she falsely comes across as having regained her health. Since she restricts her obsession to the night, eats when John is present, and stops insisting that she is ill, John’s incorrect confidence in her prognosis is confirmed: “John does not know how much I really suffer. He knows there is no reason to suffer, and that satisfies him” (2). Her shaky facade of relative wellness is accepted with enthusiasm, because it is what her audience wishes to hear. The unfortunate effect of this is that the narrator does not receive necessary attention and medical care as she devolves slowly and quietly into madness. Therefore, continuous gender-based dismissal towards genuine ailments just succeeds in encouraging women such as our narrator to suffer in silence. 

Next, the element that seemed most under scrutiny in the story is the faulty concept of ‘rest cure’ as a legitimate prescription for mentally distressed women. At a glance, all aspects of the so-called cure seem prime to enable depression or likewise incapacitating illnesses, not cure them. For instance, the entire treatment is based upon the act of social isolation. The protagonist is not only uprooted to a rural manor, but has restricted access to her former life. The entire story has no mention of getting to even hold her young infant, and though John is frequently away at work she is disallowed from even briefly conversing with loved ones: “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 fireworks in my pillow-case as to let me have those stimulating people about now” (3). On top of this, one of the few things she still enjoys - writing - is forbidden. In order to indulge herself in rare moments of serenity with writing, she must sneak around her caregivers, and claims the act of hiding tires her, not the writing itself (2). Moreover, near constant sleeping is encouraged, which atrophies her energy levels until even the smallest chore prompts exhaustion. All of this in combination culminates in a dull, monotonous existence. With nothing to enjoy, nothing to distract, our narrator lives every second of every day hyper aware of her own anguish, and naturally her health declines. In fact, it is worth consideration that the rest cure itself is responsible for her growing wallpaper obsession; the longer her prison sentence drags on without stimulation, the more she begins to invent stimulation. The hideous yellow print was simply collateral damage for a woman so desperate for a stimulant that she created a reason to continue existing: unraveling the mystery of the spectre behind the walls. It is clear that the rest cure prescribed to our narrator, herself an allegory for the unwell female population of the era, was in fact a rest imprisonment. 

To conclude, Charlotte Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper” is a socio-political criticism on the dominating patriarchal power structure running rampant in the medical field. Her own brush with the dreaded ‘rest cure’ gives the text a frantic ambiance that can only be born from having lived the part. The prominence of privilege men in the field with only an outdated, sexist understanding of women sets the conditions for the inevitable discrimination of half our species from healthcare they are rightly entitled to. But unlike other forms of more openly oppressive discrimination, women such as our narrator suffer through infuriating patronization and a lifetime of reinforced silence, and the peak of this - the utterly unhelpful ‘rest cure’ - is in essence a sentencing to death row. This once obscure truth is brought to light to be examined by the audience of the text, an act of optimism that this controversial piece will elicit tangible change. ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’ portrays the belittlement, dismissals, and repercussions of the fundamentally flawed system to perhaps previously ignorant readers from the perspective that no one other than someone similarly discriminated against can articulate: the victim. 

Works Cited

Gilman, Charlotte Perkins, “The Yellow Wallpaper.” The Norton Introduction to Literature 8th edition (eds. Jerome Beaty, Alison Booth, J. Paul Hunter and Kelly J. Mays), W.W. Norton, 2002, New York and London, pp. 673-685.