Bentley 1
Julianna Bentley
03/12/2015
Brother Williams
Gothic Fiction
The Rest Cure Malady
During the Gothic Era, women were often plagued with what doctors called a “nervous
disease,” which they believed was caused when women spent far too much time doing manly
things such as thinking or working. Women were not supposed to act like men, and when they
did it would throw off their womanly balance. Nobody knew what to do about it until Weir
Mitchell came along. Mitchell was famous for coming up with a way to fix these nervous
diseases with what he called the “Rest Cure.” Basically, all a woman needed to do to get better
was to sit very still for a very long time and eventually her woman-ly-ness would once again find
balance, and she would be healed. Most people seemed to agree that this was the only solution.
Charlotte Perkins Gilman, however, may have disagreed with the success of such a treatment. In
her story “The Yellow Wallpaper,” she creates a character who is inflicted with such a disease,
but who is not healed by the Rest Cure. In fact, Gilman uses references to Weir Mitchell and the
Rest Cure treatment to show that the isolation, idleness, and lack of trust shown to the narrator as
a way to heal her were actually the very things that caused her to go insane.
First I will discuss Gilman’s opinion of the Rest Cure and its counter-productive effects
and then move into how and why the cure causes the madness rather than heals it. Charlotte
Perkins Gilman did not like the Rest Cure. Eugenia C. Delamotte in her essay entitled “Male and
Female Mysteries in ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’” talks about the Rest Cure and how the narrator of
“The Yellow Wallpaper” does not recognize its danger right away. Delamotte says, “[…] the
Bentley 2
violence that surrounds her takes the form of the latest advances in medical knowledge about the
psychological disorders of women” (4). Here, we can clearly see what Delamotte believes,
which is that the antagonist of Gilman’s story is the Rest Cure itself, and the scariest aspect of
the story is that the danger is hidden to the narrator. She does not realize she is in a gothic fiction
right away because she isn’t in a ruined castle filled with spooky things and hidden secrets—
she’s in a nursery in an average house. But, as time goes on in the story, the narrator becomes
more and more aware of the spooky secrets of the place where she is held and the true villain
takes control of her. Michael Blackie also talks about Charlotte Perkins Gilman and her thoughts
on the Weir Mitchell. In his essay “Reading the Rest Cure,” Blackie reminds us that the narrator
in “The Yellow Wallpaper” mentions Mitchell and exposes to the reader her silent fear of him
(Blackie 57). The narrator writes, “John says if I don’t pick up faster he shall send me to Weir
Mitchell in the fall. But I don’t want to go there at all. I had a friend who was in his hands once,
and she says he is just like John and my brother, only more so!” (650). This clearly shows that
she does not want anything to do with Weir Mitchell, and that even though she has not been to
him yet, she is still being treated with his cure through John and her brother. She is scared of
Mitchell and she even becomes “a little afraid of John” (“Yellow Wallpaper” 653). So it is clear
that the narrator does not like The Rest Cure, but Blackie reminds us that it isn’t just the
character but the author herself that is not a fan of Mitchell. He even quotes a passage from the
words of Gilman herself as she directly criticizes Weir Mitchell (Blackie 57). She says, “The
real purpose of the story was to reach Dr. S. Weir Mitchell, and convince him of the error of his
ways” (Living 121). Gilman was, herself, a patient of Dr. Mitchell and she talks about her
experience in a short article “Why I Wrote the Yellow Wallpaper.” In her writing she explains
how she went to Mitchell with her illness and was treated with the Rest Cure, but instead of
Bentley 3
getting better she only got worse. She was almost to the point that her narrator end up at in her
story, when something changed. She used what little remained of her mind to “cast the noted
specialist’s advice to the winds” (“Why I Wrote” 1). She started to work again and in her work
she found normality, joy, and growth. In the end, she was not healed by Mitchell’s Rest Cure,
but in fact the exact opposite. Working, rather than resting, is what saved her, and she says that
without which “one is a pauper and a parasite” (“Why I Wrote” 1). Hal Blythe, Charlie Sweet,
and Barbara Szubinska, in their essay “Who is Jane? Getting Behind the Yellow Wallpaper,”
confirm Gilman’s distaste for Mitchell by remarking that Gilman send the famous doctor a copy
of her story after she wrote it “as a way of illustrating how counter-productive his therapy was”
(63). She believed that Weir Mitchell was wrong about his medical ideas and wanted to show
him how wrong he was. The purpose of writing the story then was to expose Mitchell’s theories
as false, and prevent more women from falling victim to the Rest Cure malady. Many critics of
“The Yellow Wallpaper,” who have read, studied and analyzed it efficiently, have come to
acknowledge and accept that Charlotte Perkins Gilman was not a fan of Weir Mitchell or his
cure, but few essays really talk about how the Rest Cure causes the madness. There isn’t a lot of
analysis on why the Rest Cure is so infecting. I believe that the complete and total isolation,
idleness, and lack of trust shown to women as a part of the Rest Cure are part of the reason why
it did not work very well.
As a part of the cure, the narrator of the story is first made to be isolated. Greg Johnson
in his essay “Gilman’s Gothic Allegory: Rage and Redemption ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’” talks
about how John, the narrator’s husband, treats his wife poorly and how he “forces his wife into
daily confinement” (524). He takes her and their child and moves for several weeks to a rented
home where the narrator can get plenty of rest. John does not allow for many visitors to come as
Bentley 4
it would be too stressful for his wife, and he also will not let her go out to see other people for
the same reason. The narrator writes that her husband “says he would as soon put fireworks in
my pillow-case as to let me have stimulating people about.” John believes that seeing other
people would only make her nervousness worse. She can’t even go to see her child because John
does not want her to worry about taking care of the baby, as he also believes it will cause her
much stress. The only people she really sees during this extended time are her husband, who
leaves quite often to go to work, and her husband’s sister Jennie. The narrator says, “I am alone
a good deal…I walk a little in the garden or down that lovely lane, sit on the porch under the
roses, and lie down here [in the nursery] a good deal” (650). With these passages we can see the
true isolation that the narrator is put into. She never gets to visit with anybody, and she is often
alone, shut up in the nursery with nobody to talk to. Such isolation drives her to seek comfort in
the only woman that seems to understand her, the woman in the wall, who is also trapped behind
the bars of the wallpaper, and in total isolation, like a prisoner in solitary confinement. Mahinur
Aksehir in his essay “Reading ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’ as a Post-Traumatic Writing” talks about
how nineteenth century middle-class women were already “isolated, lonely, and consequently
depressed” (2). He discusses how they were taught to be submissive and calm. They were meant
to be alone and content with their isolation. And this is all without illness. One a regular basis
women were treated like prisoners, with immense isolation and loneliness, and as such were
easily prone to become sick and needing treatment, but their treatments only led to more
isolation and more confinement, which only made them sicker. If men had not restricted their
women so much, they would have seen their health improve rather than diminish.
Secondly, the narrator is given nothing to do for the entire time that she is in the house.
Not only can she not visit with people or take care of her own child, but John basically says that
Bentley 5
she is “forbidden to ‘work’ until [she] is better” (648). She never gets to “do a thing” (650) and
she can’t even write, for “John…hates to have me write a word” (649) and even Jennie “cannot
catch her writing” (650) because if either of them find out that she was doing so, they would
made her stop, because they believed it was too strenuous for her. The narrator alternatively
believes that the idleness is part of the reason for her nervousness. She writes, “I disagree with
their ideas. Personally, I believe that congenial work, with excitement and change, would do me
good” (648). But nobody believes her and because John is a doctor, he claims that he knows
what is best for her. Basically the only thing she is allowed to do is take short walks in the
garden and rest on the bed in the nursery. Thus, she is so incredible bored during the day, while
John is away and Jennie is tending the housework and Mary is looking after the child, that she is
reduced to studying the wallpaper. She writes, “I lie here on this great immovable bed…and
follow that pattern about by the hour. It is as good as gymnastics, I assure you” (650). This
becomes the only excitement or stimulation of any kind for her, and so she becomes obsessed
with it; she becomes determined to reveal the secrets of the pattern and she is determined also
“that nobody shall find it out but myself!” (653). As time goes on with nothing but the wallpaper
to entertain her, the narrator begins to do nothing but examine it. She stares at it rather than
sleeping and she starts to become more secretive and more obsessed as more time passes, and
John will still not let her do anything. It is the idleness that makes her nervous and leads her to
the obsession of the wallpaper and the women behind it. She may have been sick to start with the
but the idleness only made it worse, rather than make her better, like the doctors believed it
would. As Mahinur Aksehir was mentioned earlier when discussing the isolation that lead to the
narrator’s psychosis, so too do his ideas apply to the narrator’s idleness. Because women were
often given nothing important to do other than having children for their husbands, they were
Bentley 6
easily prone to illness as a result of idleness. Aksehir says, “Even though we are not told about a
specific event that has traumatized the […narrator], it is apparent that even her everyday
experiences with her husband or within the established set of social norms are traumatizing
enough” (2). With this information we can see that the narrator is traumatized because she is a
women and her husband and the society that she lives in will not allow her to be herself. She is
suppressed and left with nothing to fill her days with other than the yellow wallpaper, and as a
result, she turns to psychosis as a way to act out. Carol Davison in her essay “Haunted
House/Haunted Heroine: Female Gothic Closets in ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’” talks about how the
idleness of the narrator leads her to wanting to obtain her “forbidden desires” (47). It is clear
that it was partly the boredom that causes her to look for something, anything, to entertain her.
Eugenia Delamotte also continues this idea. She talks about how the narrator is bored with her
surrounds and subconsciously decides to make them more interesting to entertain herself. She
says, “The narrator […] looks at an ordinary house and wishes, romantically, that it were
haunted: she longs, like every Gothic reader, to be frightened. This desire for romantic escapism
[…] masks a desire for escape” (4). Because she is bored, the narrator, used her imagination to
make life more interesting, but the more she does so the more disillusioned she becomes.
Finally, the narrator is shown very little trust and or freedom, and her every move is
watched and controlled by her husband. He treats her like a little child who cannot protect
herself and must have everything done for her. The narrator writes, “He is very careful and
loving, and hardly lets me stir without special direction” (648). This to me immediately raises
some red flags. She says that John is loving, yet he never lets her do anything by herself. This is
not loving, it’s controlling. John does not want or think that his wife is capable of doing
anything. And by telling her this over and over, he makes it so. She comes to believe that he is
Bentley 7
right. Thus she is labeled a helpless little girl, and she isn’t able to break from her brand until the
end, when she turns into the lady in the wall. It is his patronizing of her that drives her to
mistrusting him. Carol Davison recognized John’s lack of trust and freedom given to the
narrator, as she called him a “powerfully repressive male antagonist” (47). He is too controlling
of her. Barbara Welters, in her article about the way women were viewed in nineteenth century
England entitled “The Cult of True Womanhood: 1820-1860,” discussed how women were
meant to behave. She says, “Submission was perhaps the most feminine virtue expected of
women […] men were the movers, the doers, the actors. Women were the passive, submissive
responders” (158). Thus, as a woman in that day and age, the narrator of the story was expected
to submit to her husband, and she does so throughout the story even though she thinks that she
might know better. He treats her like a child or a pet rather than a grown adult with the ability to
act and think and deciding things on their own. Greg Johnson also touches on this when he
explains that John’s treatment of his wife is further made apparent by the room in which she is
kept (524). She lives in the nursery, where children are kept. Clearly, this is meant to show the
reader just how child-like John views his wife. She cannot stay in the normal room, even when
she begs, because where she truly belongs is in the nursery. And it is not just John that
patronizes her. Carol Davison continues her thoughts on the subject by talking about the how
“[the narrator’s] fears are magnified by the fact that America seems to be ‘full of Johns’—as the
narrator’s brother is a doctor and S. Weir Mitchell” (48). She is surrounded by people that want
to control her—they want to tell her how she feels, how to get better, what to do, what not to
do—and she can never act out on her own. Thus, she becomes obsessed with freeing herself,
a.k.a. the woman trapped in the wallpaper. Johnson furthers my point by discusses how it is
John’s action of putting his wife in the nursery and treating her as if she is a child that leads her
Bentley 8
to her insanity. He says, “It is here that John makes a significant error […] as he underestimates
the very imaginative power he is seeking to repress. By placing his distraught wife in a nursery,
he is merely following the nineteenth-century equation of non-maternal women […] with
helpless children” (524). He continues to explain that treating her as a child is what allows her
imagination to run wild, as a child. He also talks about how he denies her social responsibility,
which is also something common among children. He then states that because of the way John
patronizes her, the narrator “willingly accepts madness over repression, refusing a life of
‘unhappy, silent acceptance’” (522). The narrator knows that she will always be treated like a
child, her husband will never listen to her, and he and other men will continue to patronize her
for the rest of her life, so rather than put up with it any longer, she chooses madness. She
obviously cannot handle not being listened to and is sick of being made to look foolish, so she
turns to the only other alternative, which is madness. Had John treated her more respectfully,
she might not have felt like she needed to free herself from him.
In summary, the narrator starts out pretty sick after giving birth to her son, but she only
gets worse as time goes on. John forces her into the Rest Cure, and as a result, she feels isolated,
idle, bored and dumb. She had nothing to do, nobody to talk to about it, and not even her
husband will listen to her or take her seriously at all. Had John let his wife feel more free she
wouldn’t have thought she was trapped. If he hadn’t patronized her and shown his total lack of
trust for her, she would have been able to trust him in return. And if he hadn’t insisted that she
couldn’t do anything to make her feel happy and alive, she never would have become obsessed
with the wallpaper. It is John’s treatment of her and his determination to give his wife the Rest
Cure that drives her into insanity. It is the treatment that causes her greater illness. When you
treat a person like a criminal, or a sickly person, or a helpless child, they will become those
Bentley 9
things. The narrator is treated like she is insane and thus becomes so. Suzanne Poirier, in her
essay “The Weir Mitchell Rest Cure,” described a little bit about what Mitchell’s beliefs were
with the Rest Cure. She says, “[…] in Mitchell’s reasoning the physical took precedence over
the emotional. He put his case simply: ‘You cure the body and somehow find that the mind is
also cured’” (13). She then responds to this by stating that “feeling good physically can, in many
cases, restore optimism about one’s life in general. Mitchell’s generalizations, however, were
dangerously simplistic” (18). With this, we can see that Weir Mitchell believed that curing the
physical was all that needed to be done to cure the mental. Many of his patients suffered from
Anemia and other such illnesses, and so assumed that by resting, a person could be cured of the
physical side of the illness right along with the mental. But, what he got wrong is that sitting
around doing nothing is not how you cure the mind. Both the body and the mind need exercise.
And by cutting off all access to physical and mental stimulation, the mind and the body will not
recover.
Bentley 10
Works Cited
Aksehir, Mahinur. “Reading 'The Yellow Wallpaper' as Post-Traumatic Writing.” Ege İngiliz ve
Amerikan incelemeleri dergisi 17.2 (2008): 1-10. ProQuest. Web. 5 Mar. 2015.
Blackie, Michael. “Reading the Rest Cure.” Arizona Quarterly 60.2 (2004): 57-85. ProQuest.
Web. 5 Mar. 2015.
Blythe, Hal, Chalie Sweet and Barbara Szubinska. “Who is Jane? Getting Behind the ‘Yellow
Wallpaper.’” Eureka Studies in Teaching Short Fiction 4.1 (2003): 63-70. ProQuest.
Web. 5 Mar. 2015.
Davison, Carol Margaret. "Haunted House/Haunted Heroine: Female Gothic Closets In "The
Yellow Wallpaper." Women's Studies 33.1 (2004): 47-75. Academic Search Premier.
Web. 5 Mar. 2015.
Delamotte, Eugenia C. “Male and Female Mysteries in ‘The Yellow Wallpaper.’” University of
Nebraska Press 5.1 (1988): 3-14. ProQuest. Web. 5 Mar. 2015.
Gilman, Charlotte Perkins. "The Yellow Wallpaper and Other Stories”. Mineola, N.Y.: Dover
Publications, 1997. 1-14. Print.
---. The Living of Charlotte Perkins Gilman: An Autobiography. New York: Appleton-Century,
1935. Rpt. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1990.
---. “Why I wrote ‘The Yellow Wallpaper.’” The Forerunner 4 (1913): 271.
Johnson, Greg. "Gilman's Gothic Allegory: Rage and Redemption in "The Yellow Wallpaper."
Studies In Short Fiction 26.4 (1989): 521-530. Academic Search Premier. Web. 5 Mar.
2015.
Bentley 11
Poirier, Suzanne. “The Weir Mitchell Rest Cure: Doctor and Patients.” Women’s Studies 10
(1983): 15-40.
Welter, Barbara. “The Cult of True Womanhood: 1820-1860.” The American Family in SocialHistorical Perspective. Ed. Michael Gordon. 2nd ed. New York: St. Martin’s, 1978. 313333.