Hysterika on the Run

“All and all it’s just another brick in the wall” (Waters). For every burdensome thought or idea that weighs on one’s shoulders, the mind adds another brick to its wall of defenses. Mental illnesses manifest themselves in many ways. The mind tries to protect itself against undesirable thoughts. More often than not this onslaught of thoughts becomes too much for the mind and its walls come crumbling down. The narrator in “The Yellow Wallpaper” loses this decisive battle within her subconscious. When applying a psychoanalytic lens to “The Yellow Wallpaper,” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, the narrator’s mental issues become evident, and her delusions can be explained by theories on psychological projection, postpartum depression, and early misconstrued beliefs pertaining to women’s mental illnesses and treatments.

To deal with the day-to-day things a person goes through in their life, our minds have constructed ego defenses. These defense mechanisms “operate at an unconscious level and help ward off unpleasant feelings (i.e. anxiety) or make good things feel better for the individual” (McLeod, “Defense”). To better understand the mind’s defenses one must first understand the parts of a person’s psyche. The psyche is comprised of three parts: the id, ego, and superego (McLeod, “Id”). The id is instinctual. It is what controls the primitive instincts of the mind. The ego is the part of the psyche that reacts and interacts with one’s external surroundings. The superego directs one’s morals and values in life (McLeod, “Id”). The superego works in contradiction against the id and the ego attempts to mediate between the two (“Id”). Partly due to the struggles within her psyche, the narrator becomes mentally unstable. She experiences a form of psychological projection, the act of projecting uncomfortable thoughts or feelings on to a convenient alternative target which can be real or believed (“Projection”). One begins to see this as the narrator starts to describe the patterns she sees contained in the wallpaper with more detail. For example, the room she is staying in has bars across the windows and she states, “...by moonlight [the pattern] becomes bars” (Gilman, 653)! The mind implements “defense mechanisms to protect [itself] from feelings of anxiety or guilt, which arise because [one] feel[s] threatened, or because [the] id or superego becomes too demanding (McLeod, “Defense”). The narrator may suffer from specifically subconscious complementary projection. The subject inflected with complementary projection will assume “that others do, think and feel in the same way as [themselves]” (“Projection”). She further describes the plight of the woman in the wallpaper saying, “[She] seemed to shake the pattern, just as if she wanted to get out” (Gilman, 652). This would represent her own growing desire to leave the room that John, her husband, has condemned her to. The narrator creates the woman in the wallpaper and attributes her own feelings of being trapped onto her. At one point in the story she writes, “[that the pattern] strangles so...” (Gilman, 654). The pattern traps the woman and she is trapped in the confines of her room. She says, “And I’ve pulled off most of the paper, so you can’t put me back’” (Gilman, 656)! The narrator freed the woman in the wallpaper, and in ripping the wallpaper off the wall she freed herself from this psychological torment she created for herself. This only one piece of her plethora of psychological problems.

Pregnancy and childbirth puts a woman’s body through a lot of stress physically and mentally, and it does not stop after the baby is born. Symptoms of postpartum depression may include: depression/severe mood swings, excessive crying, difficulty bonding with the child, withdrawal from family and friends, loss of appetite or eating excessively, insomnia, overwhelming fatigue/loss of energy, reduced interest hobbies and other activities, fear of being a bad mother, feeling of worthlessness, shame, guilt, or inadequacy, lessened ability to think clearly or concentrate, severe anxiety or panic attacks, thoughts of harming oneself or the baby, recurring thoughts of death or suicide (Mayo Clinic Staff, Symptoms). A woman experiences “changes in hormone levels—levels of estrogen and progesterone decrease sharply in the hours after childbirth. These changes may trigger depression in the same way that smaller changes in hormone levels trigger mood swings and tension before menstrual periods” ("Postpartum”). Hormones produced by the thyroid gland may also drop sharply after birth — “which can leave [one] feeling tired, sluggish and depressed” (Mayo Clinic Staff, Causes). The narrator would have experienced a rollercoaster of emotional and physical changes discussed. One can infer that the narrator has postpartum depression. She states that she has a baby but that she does not take care of the child. As the story develops, she begins to display more symptoms of postpartum depression and other mental problems. Her inability to take care of the child, herself, and the house makes her feel like “a comparative burden” (Gilman, 649). These thoughts almost certainly would have caused her to feel some sort of guilt or shame. The narrator states that she suffers from intense anger, stating, “I get unreasonably angry with John sometimes” and “I got so angry I bit off a little piece [of the bed frame] at one corner...” (Gilman, 648, 655). Towards the end of the story, she is afflicted with overwhelming lethargy and loses almost all interest in her writing seeing no point to it anymore (Gilman). Her excessive lack of energy was presumably caused by insomnia. She believes that the pattern in the wallpaper changes at night and states, “...I watch it always” (Gilman, 653). Her worsened condition leads her to become isolated and withdraw from her husband and Jennie, who is John’s sister. The fact that her husband is gone most of the time dealing with severe cases only strengthens this. She becomes consumed by her endless thoughts about the wallpaper and the mysterious woman trapped within. The narrator also suffers from severe anxiety. She writes many times throughout her entries that she is afflicted with troubling nervousness and it grows in severity. The hormonal problems that the narrator suffers from also led her to cry excessively. She writes, “I cry at nothing, and cry most of the time” (Gilman, 650). The narrator’s condition causes her to have a severely weakened cognitive ability as well. As her isolation increases and her cognitive ability decreases, she becomes more and more fixated on the wallpaper and its confusing pattern, leading her to spiral deeper and deeper into depression. A reader will also notice that the narrator does not mention her baby throughout the story more than two times. She only notes that the baby is well and that it is “fortunate Mary is so good with the baby” (Gilman, 649). She could be trying to not think about the baby and suffering from psychological repression on that part. The narrator may be attempting to put thoughts of the child from her mind because of her inability to care of said child and how she believed society would view her because of this. During the early 1900’s a women’s main job was to have and care for her offspring. This view of a woman’s social position also affected how they were treated for illnesses.

Throughout the ages, men have believed that a woman’s biology is below their own. The term hysteria is derived from the Greek word hysterika, which means uterus. The ancient Greeks believed a “that a wandering and discontented uterus was blamed for that dreaded female ailment of excessive emotion, hysteria” (Traniello). The disease’s symptoms were attributed to the movement of the “offending” organ (Traniello). The first to identify this particular disorder was the ancient Greek physician Hippocrates. He noted that “hysteria was common in women and thought it was caused by a displaced or ‘wandering uterus’” (Traniello). There was little understanding of a woman’s biology and the term hysteria was used to describe most of the physical and emotional ailments of women. For Aristotle, women were not included in his philosophical teachings because of their “bad biology” (Traniello). It was not only during the times of ancient Greece that a women’s health diagnosis and treatment were based on their inferiority to men. During the late 1800s and early 1900s, a common treatment for a woman’s mental illnesses was institutionalization. Many women were placed in asylums if they did not behave in a way that men agreed with. Women were diagnosed as insane for reasons such as, “religious excitement, epilepsy, and suppressed menstruation” (Pouba, 95). Women had minimal rights concerning their health. The decision for institutionalization was decided by a husband or male relative. Many of the symptoms women were admitted for then they would not be admitted for now. Some examples of symptoms that qualified as reasons for admittance were: “depression after the death of a loved one, use of abusive language, and suppressed menstruation” (Pouba, 95). During that time, epilepsy and nymphomania were both viewed as forms of insanity, not diseases. Doctors even believed that overexertion was a diagnosis of insanity (Pouba, 95-96). A notable doctor who had misguided theories about the mental health of women was S. Weir Mitchell. Mitchell was an American physician known for inventing the rest cure. In 1873, Mitchell gives his first written account of the rest cure (Stiles). He wrote Fat and Blood. In this work, Mitchell extensively described the rest cure. Mitchell would advise certain patients to lie in bed half the day and sew and read a little. Other women were prescribed to stay in bed a full month. These patients were not permitted to read, write, or sew and were taken care of by one nurse who could not be a relative (Mitchell, 40-41). Depending on the severity of the patient’s condition, some were prescribed to lay on a lounge for certain periods of times throughout the day while others were subjected to total bed rest (Mitchell, 41-42). He made a habit of advising a patient to stay in bed anywhere from six weeks to a full two months. In cases where a woman prescribed bed rest, for the first four to five weeks, Mitchell would not allow them to sew, read, write, or even to merely sit up. They were only permitted to fulfill the necessity of dental hygiene. Mitchell went so far as to not allow particular patients to even turn over without assistance. In this instant, Mitchell arranged “...to have the bowels and water passed while lying down, and the patient is lifted on to a lounge at bedtime and sponged, and then lifted back again into the newly-made bed“(Mitchell, 42). He also insisted that one be fed by a nurse (Mitchell, 42). Mitchell did this because “...sometimes [he thought] no motion desirable, and because sometimes the moral influence of absolute repose is of use" (Mitchell 41, 42). “The moral uses of enforced rest are readily estimated” based on a patient’s specific conditions (Mitchell, 43). Mitchell believed that a quiet and controlled atmosphere and the care of a nurse would greatly reduce the nervous symptoms of women (Mitchell, 43). This normal and systematic form of care a viable alternative to “... a [normal patient’s] restless life of irregular hours, and probably endless drugging...” (Mitchell, 43). Depending on the strength of the mentality of the patient, the rest cure may have worked for some. However, yet the undiscovered dangers of isolation and the predisposition to mental disorders led to the failure of medical science to recognize the negative impact of this treatment. Mitchell stated in his book that “...no harm is done by rest...” but that is not the case for Gilman or the narrator (Mitchell, 40). In 1887, Charlotte Perkins Gilman was prescribed the rest cure by a specialist for her mental distress as was the narrator in her story. She was to “’live as domestic a life as far as possible,’ to ‘have but two hours’ intellectual life a day,’ and ‘never to touch pen, brush, or pencil again’...”(Gilman, “Why”). Gilman followed these directions for a whole three months and stated that she “came so near the borderline of utter mental ruin that [she] could see over” (Gilman, “Why”). She goes on to say that the physician nearly drove her mad with this treatment. Physicians during this time treated mental illnesses like a physical ailment. The narrator believes that the fact John is a physician could be why she does not get well faster. He does not believe that she is really sick and that it is just a “temporary nervous depression” (Gilman, 648). Her brother is also a physician that thinks the same things as John. The narrator disagrees with both of them. She knows that she is afflicted with more than just temporary nervousness. John forced the rest cure upon her. The narrator has “a schedule prescription for each hour in the day” and loses all independence as John takes all care from her. Her husband states that she should not think of her condition or speak of it to him. Instead of allowing her to discuss it and figure out the problem, he tells her to ignore it and let it be. She is also not to make fantasies in her head as John believes this will aggravate her temperament. He also makes statements like, “’I am a doctor, dear, and I know’” (Gilman, 652). John thinks that he knows more because he is a doctor and though he loves his wife he presumably views her as inferior to himself. One may conceive that John may also be blinded by his love for her and believe there is nothing wrong with her solely because he wants her to get better. All of these inaccuracies pertaining to mental illnesses during this time period led to the aggravation of the narrator’s postpartum depression and the final collapse of her psyche.

When applying a psychoanalytic lens to “The Yellow Wallpaper,” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, the narrator’s mental issues become apparent and can be explained by theories on psychological defenses, postpartum depression, and misconceived notions about mental illnesses during the late 1800s and early 1900s. The narrator’s postpartum depression could have been easily treated and cured if doctors during that times had accesses to the knowledge we have now. With the therapy and the right treatments, the narrator could have been able to take care of her children for the duration of her days.

References

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Traniello, Vanessa. "Hysteria and the Wandering Womb." N.p., Web. 13 Apr. 2016. <http://academic.mu.edu/meissnerd/hysteria.html>.

Waters, Roger. Another Brick in the Wall. Pink Floyd. Bob Ezrin, 1979. Vinyl recording.