WOMEN AND

MADNESS

Jurdana Gonzlez Campano, Irene Daz Corcobado,

Loreto Ballesteros Pesquera, Pilar Cuesta Barriga
- La Mujer en la Cultura Anglo-Norteamericana - Curso 2015-2016 -

CONTENTS
1. Introduction .. 3
2. Social and cultural background ... 4
3. Charlotte Perkins Gilman . 5
4. Writing and madness .... 6
5. Hysteria as an illness in The Yellow Wallpaper ... 8
6. Conclusions .... 10
Bibliography

1. INTRODUCTION
During the 19th century, mental health was not seen the same way depending on the patient, and
especially if the patient was a woman. Women who suffered from any type of mental illness were treated
with certain therapies that, far from improving the patients condition, worsened it to the point of going
totally insane. Many authors wrote about this topic in their literary works, and one of the best examples is
Charlotte Perkins Gilman and her short story The Yellow Wallpaper.
In this paper, we are going to talk about these women and how mental illnesses were seen during
that century. First of all we will mention some aspects of the historical and social context, what was the
situation during the 19th century, especially during its second half in which the text we are going to analyze
was written. Then we will talk about the life of Charlotte Perkins Gilman and what was her situation. After
that we will talk about the relationship between writing and madness and how was madness seen during
that part of the century, and finally we will analyze The Yellow Wallpaper, which illustrates the attitude
people had towards women with mental health issues during the second half of the 19th century, and also
the effects of the therapies that doctors recommended to their patients.

2. HISTORICAL AND SOCIAL BACKGROUND

Charlotte Perkins Gilman wrote The Yellow Wallpaper during the last decade of the 19th century, in
1892. By that time, the situation of the United States was that of a country which was pretty much
recovered from a Civil War that had come to an end some years earlier. After the war, the society was
experiencing many changes, especially towards money. The country was becoming very wealthy and
powerful, and consumerism was very present in peoples daily lives.
The role of women during the first half of the 19th century was mostly the role of the housewife,
although some women worked outside their houses, but these women could not support themselves
economically and normally the money they earned had to be for their parents if they were single, or for their
husbands if they were married. However, as we have said, that was an exception, and womens workplace
was their house in most of the cases while men were the ones that worked outside, so the two spheres of
men and womens activities were still differentiated. Women took care of their children and their husbands,
they were mothers, wives and housewives, and men worked outside and maintained women.
During the second half of the century this situation started to change little by little although the two
spheres were still different. The Seneca Falls Convention (Seneca Falls, New York, 1848) was the starting
point for the debate of the rights of women, a reunion in which the first feminists, the early feminists,
discussed the social, civil and cultural situation of women. It was organized by Elizabeth Cady Stanton,
Lucrecia Mott, Martha Wright and Mary Ann McClintock, and its result was the Declaration of Sentiments, a
document signed by this group of early feminists in which they proclaimed their situation and the rights they
should have as women and as citizens. From that moment many other conventions and movements started
to appear with the purpose of promoting the rights of women despite the counter-movements of people
defending the traditional image of the woman as a housewife. This was the beginning of the womens rights
movement. By the end of the century the concept of new woman was something popular, which made
reference to that woman who has a life outside her house and her family, an intelligent and talented woman
who does not follow the fashion conventions of the time and does not care about the popular opinion, and
who is perfectly capable of working outside her house.

3. CHARLOTTE PERKINS GILMAN

Charlotte Perkins Gilman was born the 3rd of July of 1860 in Connecticut, and with 32 years old she
published her most famous short-story The Yellow Wallpaper. Her early life was marked by her fathers
neglect when he abandoned Charlotte, her mother and another sibling. As a result, she had to move
constantly and due to this her education was affected, but basically she educated herself by reading texts
about philosophy, historical development and ancient civilizations (Charlotte Perkins Gilman Biography).
Years after her marriage with Charles Stetson with whom she had a daughter, Katharine-, Charlotte
had a great depression and she was treated by S. Weir Mitchell, a very well-known neurologist from
Philadelphia, with unusual procedures. The basis of his treatment was that she had to stay in bed for a long
time and later on continue working in the role of wife and mother; this was called the rest cure (About
Charlotte Perkins Gilman). She was not allowed to write or paint and she should not read longer than two
hours a day. Charlotte tried to follow this routine, but she nearly had a mental breakdown and eventually
she got divorced from her husband (Charlotte Anna Perkins Gilman Facts). What she went through in this
experience might have been her inspiration to write The Yellow Wallpaper.
Besides being a fiction writer, Charlotte Perkins was also known for her feminist activism. She
defended that women had to be independent economically. Some of her non-fiction writings are Women
and Economics -published in 1898 and with which she won recognition at an international level-, The Home:
Its Work and Influence published in 1903-, and Does a Man Support His Wife? which was published in 1915
(Charlotte Perkins Gilman). Moreover, she published a magazine called The Forerunner in which she wrote
about issues concerning women and social reform.
Charlotte married twice, and the second time was with her cousin George Gilman. They were
together until he died in 1934, and in 1935 Charlotte found out that she had terminal breast cancer and
finally committed suicide with chloroform the 17th of August of 1935. She left a note on her suicide in The
Living of Charlotte Perkins Gilman, her autobiography (Charlotte Anna Perkins Gilman Facts).

4. WRITING AND MADNESS

There are a lot of works that deal with the topic of madness in literature, and we wanted to pay
attention to three of them. These three are considered to be the most influential works of literary theory
and feminist criticism.
The first work we want to focus on is The Madwoman in the Attic (1979), written by Sandra Gilbert,
Professor Emerita of English at the University of California, and Susan Gubar, Professor Emerita of that same
university. This was a revolutionary work which retrieves some female authors like Kate Chopin or Charlotte
Perkins Gilman, who were long forgotten by that time.
The book starts with an interesting quote: Is a pen a metaphorical penis? In the book The Ottoman
Empire and Its Heritage, Women in the Ottoman Empire: Middle Eastern Women in the Early Modern Era,
Kemal Silay explains that with this quote, the authors wanted to show that patriarchal ideology defines
artistic creativity as a male quality (Silay, 198). Gilbert and Gubar tried to find a distinctive female voice in
the literary production of women writers of England and America of the 19th century. Although this book was
groundbreaking when it was published, some critics do not agree with the fact that they only focused on the
madness of women.
The second work we want to focus on is Writing and Madness (1985), written by Shoshana Felman, a
Woodruff Professor of Comparative Literature and French at Emory University. This work explores the
relationships between literature, philosophy, and psychoanalysis through the study of Balzac, Nerval,
Flaubert, Lacan, Fouacult and Derrida.
As far as literature is concerned, the author wants to find the specify of literature in its relation to
what culture understands by the concept of madness. The way in which literature communicates with
madness, explains Stanford University Press in its review of the book, is by dramatizing those relationships
that exist between sense and nonsense, reason and unreason, and the readable and the unreadable.
The last work we want to mention is The Female Malady (1988), written by Elaine Showalter, an
American literary critic and writer on cultural and social issues. This is a work that deals with the
representation of women and madness and the male protagonists who, as professor Janet Sayers says, are
both celebrated and deplored. Through the study of the psychiatric profession and its ideas, Showalter is
able to prove that our culture considers women as more prone to irrationality and mental imbalance without
even foundation. Moreover, as professor Andrew Scull remarks, by using literary and pictorial
representations of the mad, asylum records and the private papers of patients, the author shows us all the

contributions of psychiatry to the bad image of women who, in many cases, were talented and successful
women who found themselves trapped in one of these institutions of bad mental health.

4. HYSTERIA AS AN ILLNESS IN THE YELLOW WALLPAPER

In the Victorian age, many women like Charlotte Perkins Gilman lived and wrote in a time where two
opposing ideological currents cohabited: cult of domesticity (which was believed to be inherent to women)
vs. New Woman. According to Quawas, Gilman was ahead of her own time (), she defied cultural
stereotypes and patriarchal assumptions and planted her feminist ideas in her own writings (Quawas, 37).
In her works, and in other short stories of the time, the insanity of the female protagonist is presented as a
rebellion against the medical and political oppression that women suffered from. In some cases, the
treatment for these illnesses involved the ban on writing, most likely due to the fact that the act of writing
was a rebellion in itself, a way for women to assert their identity and autonomy. The cure to hysteria
according to the doctors of the time, like Silas Weir Mitchell's, would only be achieved if the woman would
return to her household duties and dismiss any kind of intellectual activity, and this poses the question
whether it was a cure or rather a repression of the self. According to Sigurdar, as women began testing
their boundaries and vying for their freedom, some of the more powerful opposition came from the
scientific and medical establishment which specialised in nervous and mental illness (Sigurdar 2013) and
that includes women writers.
It is quite possible that a great deal of women's illnesses in the nineteenth century, like hysteria,
which was a common diagnosis for many Victorian women, were a result of the oppression they
experienced. Moreover, madness was linked to women as something that was expected of them by the
society which they belonged to. Mental illnesses or disorders could be no less than a response to a
destructive society, a society that inhibited their anger and prescribed passivity.
Gilmans story not only portrays the protagonists insanity but also the powerlessness that meant
being a woman in the Victorian age. However, one of the most interesting aspects in the story is the
rendering of a discourse of the insanity as a way of rebelling against gender role prescriptions and this could
be seen as a feminist counter discourse against the dominant social order. In the story, the protagonist goes
mad because she has realized that she has assumed a socially prescribed self to the detriment of her own
identity. It is also necessary to point out that the exaggerated descent into madness of the protagonist could
be the writers reaction to the medical policies imposed to women at the time. It reads as a criticism against
Mitchell's treatment for neurasthenia, the 'rest-cure, since the author had undergone treatment herself. In
this sense, the story counts with an autobiographical overtone. In The Yellow Wallpaper, madness is
depicted as a refuge for the self. The schizoid departure in the form of madness from oppressive society
and from the passive role to which women have been traditionally relegated to seems in the story like a
practical way of self-preservation. Gradually through the story, the protagonist is forced to rest and her

husband forbids her to work until shes well, although she does not agree with that treatment. The narrator
is confined in a room she hates by her husband, and through her descent to madness, she dissociates her
true self from her social self and the perception of others. In this room, she starts having hallucinations of a
woman trapped in the rooms wallpaper; the narrator says it is like a woman stooping down and creeping
about behind that pattern (Perkins Gilman, 64) and she begins to feel identified with this woman behind
the wallpaper. She peels this yellow wallpaper that she loathes, freeing herself while freeing this woman
behind the wallpaper and symbolically tearing apart her own constraints: I wasn't alone a bit! As soon as it
was moonlight and that poor thing began to crawl and shake the pattern, I got up and ran to help her. I
pulled and she shook, I shook and she pulled, and before morning we had peeled off yards of that paper
(Perkins Gilman, 78). In the end, she returns victorious from her descent into madness with a renovated
sense of identity.
As a conclusion to this part of our paper, and taking Gilmans short story as an example, it can be
asserted that many women who were diagnosed hysteria were so because they rejected the tangible
domestic confinement and also the intangible restriction of the patriarchal rules of society. The story tells us
that this inability to fit into the passive role that was expected from women would lead them to madness. In
The Yellow Wallpaper we can see a clear example of how passivity and Mitchells rest-cure could make a
woman delve into madness. Madness is depicted as freedom for these women, but the alleged cure is in her
oppressors hands.

5. CONCLUSIONS
We can finally agree that women, if they looked for some intellectual and individual development
and were not fully devoted to their family, were considered mentally ill. This situation was not conceivable
for women, so they were diagnosed certain illnesses like hysteria and the medical prescription they were
given was to rest and go back to their household duties. Because of this many women felt constrained and
devaluated, so they fought to continue with their passion; as we have seen in the case of Charlotte Perkins
Gilman, she wrote about this mental issue in order to express out the situation many women were living.

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"Sandra M. Gilbert." Biography -. Web. 01 May 2016.

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Sigurardttir, Elsabet Rakel. "Women and Madness in the 19th Century The Effects of Oppression
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