Victorian Context: Female Hysteria and Suffering

Hysteria 

• This was a condition associated with women – symptoms: shortness of breath, heaviness in the abdomen, muscular spasms, and fainting. Anxiety, irritability and embarrassing or unusual behaviours were also noted.
• 1800s: hysteria was recast as a nervous disease. 
• Nearly all Victorian physicians considered women more sensitive and mentally & emotionally fragile than men. 
• They believed women were more susceptible to nervous breakdowns and ‘weak nerves’, so hysteria had to be a nervous disease.
• late 1800s: French neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot proposed hysteria was a more general inherited nerve disease, not a ‘sexual problem’ unique to women.
• Freud later developed the theory that hysteria was rooted in unconscious emotional conflict rather than weak nerves. 

Neurasthenia 

• Neurasthenia emerged as a new nervous disease in the late 1800s. 
• The term was coined by American asylum doctor Van Deusen who noted a particular condition among rural, isolated communities of farmers and especially farmer’s wives.
• People with neurasthenia were lonely, bored, depressed and often overburdened with childcare and housework.
• Typical symptoms = irritability, insomnia, indigestion and general malaise, which could develop into mental breakdown if ignored.
• NYC: neurologist George Beard popularised the term and said the epidemic was due to the hectic pace of urban life.
• Neurasthenia could be the result of rural isolation and boredom, or urban over-stimulation and crowding – juxtaposing ideals 
• Treatment was similar to nervous breakdowns: therapies if you could afford them and tonics if you could not. Another popular and safe treatment, especially for neurasthenic men was vigorous outdoor exercise.
• The diagnosis of neurasthenia never caught on in Britain, where doctors saw it as an American attempt to lend false scientific legitimacy to the old condition of nerves.

The Rest Cure

• The rest cure was a strictly enforced regime of 5-8 weeks of bed rest and isolation, without any creative or intellectual activity/stimulation
• often accompanied by massage and electrotherapy + fatty diet, rich in milk and meat → According to Mitchell, the high-fat diet boosted weight and blood supply, making a woman “as a mother more capable, as a wife more helpful”
• It was devised by neurologist Silas Weir Mitchell as a treatment for neurasthenia. 
• It was also used to treat hysteria and anorexia nervosa – prescribed more for women than men.
• Weir saw the rest cure as suited to treating women, partly because he thought women tolerated a lack of stimulation and inactivity better than men.
• He also saw it as a corrective for women who were overly active, socially and physically.
• The rest cure was mainly suitable for educated, skilled and wealthy patients who had time and help to undergo the treatment in their own homes or in fashionable sanatorium. 
• It may have kept some patients alive and others out of asylums, but some patients and doctors found the cure worse than the disease. 

The Yellow Wallpaper – Charlotte Perkins Gilman 

Initial responses to the novella = overwhelmingly negative 

“I could not forgive myself if I made others as miserable as I have made myself by reading this” – Atlantic Monthly editor Horace Scudder, 1892

The Author 

• A writer and mother from New England, living in California 
• She had been a patient of the famous, eccentric physician S. Weir Mitchell, evangelist of the notorious “rest cure”
• A lecturer for social reform and identified as a utopian feminist 
• She wrote The Yellow Wallpaper following a severe bout of postpartum psychosis

The Guardian 

• The Yellow Wallpaper speaks directly to the “#metoo” movement 
• The narrator describes a sort of psychological torture – John (husband) doesn’th know her pain 
• The Yellow Wallpaper recognises, let alone gives a name to: “coercive control”. An older term for it might be “gaslighting”.

Controlling the Female Psyche: Assigned Gender Roles in “The Yellow Wallpaper” – Elizabeth Carey, 2011

‘physicians employed the “rest cure” as a way to regain control over a situation they

did not comprehend’

• Highlights how rigid gender roles have an impact – John is the well-respected, rational doctor who is always taken seriously 
• John believes that if his wife represses her creative urges she will become well again and assume the role of wife and mother.
• John assumes the role of thinking partner in their marriage – won’t let her think for herself and dismisses her input/voice

Janice Haney Peritz

• The Yellow Wallpaper shows that in a patriarchal society, we are all doomed; no one can survive the rigid gender expectations placed upon them 
• If John wasn’t so overconfident in his own reason and authority as a doctor and husband, he might have been able to help his wife – by listening 
• If the narrator had not been so willing to conform to John’s wishes and had not assumed that he was always right, then she might have been better able to stand up for herself. 
• The narrator says, “It is so hard to talk with John about my case, because he is so wise, and because he loves me so” →  She questions herself instead of him. 

Colonial links 

• The building in which the narrator is imprisoned is an old “colonial” mansion, dating from the age of slave-keeping in America. 
• The shackles in the room hint at the violent physical restraint of black bodies.
• Wiley suggests that the point is to bring together these clashing traditions as a way of thinking about the historical exclusion of certain kinds of bodies from the privileges of high art.

Early critics read this as nothing more than a frightening tale typical of the Gothic genre.

Susan Lesser: “The Victorian public were not frightened at a scary, Poe-like tale; they were baulking at something more particular: the ‘graphic representation of ‘raving lunacy’ in a middle-class mother and wife that revealed the rage of the woman on a pedestal”

Suffering 

Now

• House of Commons MPs that are female = 34%
• The proportion of female police inspectors = 21.7%
• Number of female CEOs of FTSE companies = 7
•  struggle for Linde and Nora to get into power/work
• Rape convictions in England and Wales have fallen to a record low 
• The way Nora was treated when she said no to T

• Globally women earn 24% less than men 
• Only 140 countries guarantee gender equality
• Women are severely underrepresented in the news
• 2019: employer equal pay stats made available for the first time 
• Lack of knowledge, lack of means to fully understand – like Nora with the law 
• 33,000 girls become child brides every day

Then

• 1888: 1st equal pay at the Trades Union Congress
• ‘Working’ class women fuelled the industrial revolution – 60-80% of the workforce
• Women who had jobs outside of the home were less likely to marry – no choice but to stay in undesirable situations 
• Several authors tried to address the issue 
• Passing the bill meant many laws end up limiting the amount of time and money women could potentially earn due to limiting hours of work 

Prostitutes were often arrested (avg 2.5k) annually – to keep streets ‘clean’ and free of ‘fallen and ‘wicked’

• Prostitution done instead of low pay of other women’s work – to escape from supervision of factory work and domestic services
• prostitution was highly representative of women in the 19th century – most women in the 19th century (prostitutes and married women) had no choice anyway e.g they cannot say no to their husband 
• were deemed to be whores – still seen in the modern era with women seemingly ‘asking for it’ when wearing more revealing clothing