Lilly Tzanides

Preventable Madness

The story of “The Yellow Wallpaper” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman is a narrative about a woman who slowly loses her mind as she is being treated for her illness.  Her illness, which is described in the text as a “nervous depression”, is not taken or treated with serious care, and the neglect of her needs as a patient with hysterical symptoms is ultimately what brings her to the point of insanity. In Sigmund Freud’s first lecture on Psycho-Analysis, he brings up a point that relates to the series of events in Gilman’s story, the point being that most doctors tend to have a flippant attitude towards patients with hysterical symptoms.  The main character in the story is treated as such, and her state is worsened by this lack of care, and is arguably preventable.  

In Freud’s lecture, one of the first things he discusses is the difference in the attitudes of doctors who are treating patients with organic illnesses and with those treating patients presenting symptoms of hysteria.  In regards to such doctors he states, “ It is noticeable that [a doctor’s] attitude towards hysterical patients is quite other than towards sufferers from organic diseases. He does not have the same sympathy for the former as for the latter”.  His observation of this disparity illustrates Freud’s main criticism that most doctors treating a patient with hysteria are less inclined to take the case seriously.  This lack of legitimate care for a patient suffering from hysteria or its symptoms plays a huge role in “The Yellow Wallpaper”.  John, the narrator’s husband who is a physician, fails to successfully treat his wife because he is unwilling to work with her to find a solution for her illness, and doesn’t even take the fact that she is ill seriously.  She is said to have nervous depression, which is considered to be a hysterical tendency.  On the second page the narrator states,  “John does not know how much I really suffer.  He knows there is no reason to suffer, and that satisfies him.” The attitude he takes on that there is no physical ailment for her to suffer from is in fact neglect that ultimately causes her state to worsen, and by the end of the text it is obvious that she has lost all sensibility.  

This could have been avoided if John were to take similar steps that Dr. Breuer did with his patient, as mentioned in Freud’s lecture.  Breuer was a doctor who had more compassion for such patients and was a pioneer in using talk therapy or “chimney sweeping” as a method of resolving internal conflict in patients that other doctors would instead treat otherwise.  Freud points out that many symptoms were reduced or eradicated by using this method, and that this is where other doctors have failed when using only bed rest or medications instead.  This is again reflected in “The Yellow Wallpaper” since bed rest and medication were the only things used to treat the narrator, given that her mental state deteriorated regardless.  That said, the story of “The Yellow Wallpaper” could have had a very different ending given different treatment for the narrator’s illness, such as the methods introduced by Breuer.  While little context is given for how and when the main character began having her symptoms, it is likely that there is a root cause or trigger for her “nervousness”.  It is plausible to infer that such a cause or trigger could have been revealed and even resolved with methods like talking cure and hypnosis instead.  This idea is backed  heavily by Freud’s first lecture, where he explains the long term effects that support the claim that talking cure had more benefits for patients than the more common practices.  Furthermore, in Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “Why I Wrote The Yellow Wallpaper”, she explains that the story was inspired by her own experience, where she “came so near the borderline of utter mental ruin that [she] could see over”, and that she only made a recovery when she acted contrary to her doctor’s orders, much like Breuer’s approach.  

Ultimately, a reader reflecting on the nameless woman in “The Yellow Wallpaper” may never know how exactly she suffered, but an inference can be made that her mental health was not unsalvageable from the start.  Given Freud’s lecture, Gilman’s own account, and the cries for help from the nameless woman herself, the story could and should have ended differently.  Instead, it effectively illustrates a problem that Freud brings up, that patients with a mentally rooted illness were not treated with the same care as those with physical emergencies, and that for many such patients under such care, a descent into preventable madness would be inevitable.