Mitchell’s essay “Fat and Blood” can be found here (it’s the eighth edition, can you believe it was that popular?): http://www.gutenberg.org/files/16230/16230-h/16230-h.htm
Mitchell’s October 1913 article in The Forerunner, “Why I Wrote The Yellow Wallpaper” can be found here: http://www.library.csi.cuny.edu/dept/history/lavender/whyyw.html
When the depressed narrator of Frances Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper” is not improving at the rate her husband had wished, she remarks, “John says if I don’t pick up faster he shall send me to Weir Mitchell in the fall.” What is fascinating about Gilman’s autobiographically inspired story is that it would fit as easily into a course on gothic fiction as a course on science and literature. “The Yellow Wallpaper” is a fictional rendering of the then-common treatment for a cluster of mood disorders that Silas Weir Mitchell and other nineteenth-century physicians classified as “Neurasthenia.” Mitchell, as Gilman’s narrator alludes to, was one of the leading advocates of “the rest cure” as treatment for female nervous disorders.
A striking theme within “The Yellow Wallpaper” is woman as feigner of illness or as exaggerator of illness. When Gilman’s piece is read within the context of Weir’s essay “Fat and Blood,” the desperateness of the narrator’s situation becomes all the more evident. The narrator begins the story by remarking that her husband John “does not believe I am sick!” Her realization—almost shamefully voiced—of her unhealthy emotional responses strike her (and the reader) as meriting attention. She wants to hold her newborn, but John’s sister Mary cares for the child because the narrator admits (but only to the reader), “I cannot be with him, it makes me so nervous.” The reader is overcome with the feeling that although the narrator may be unwell, she is well enough to know her condition (and her emotions) better than the medical world (represented by John, his unnamed brother-in-law, and Mitchell). The narrator remarks, “John does not know how much I really suffer. He knows there is no reason to suffer, and that satisfies him.” But as a woman, the narrator must cede knowledge of herself to others: “If a physician of high standing, and one's own husband, assures friends and relatives that there is really nothing the matter with one but temporary nervous depression -- a slight hysterical tendency -- what is one to do?”
There is almost a sense of dramatic irony to the story approaching this piece in an era that has been so invested in understanding and acknowledging the seriousness of mental disorders. But in Gilman’s lifetime, the treatment that she and her narrator received was the norm. In “Fat and Blood,” Mitchell speaks to his medical colleagues from the pages, announcing that this work is devoted to describing the best treatment of the disorders of “nervous women,” “women of a class well known to every physician” (Chapter I). Mitchell’s treatment of the subject of nervous disorders in women, whether his tone is intentional or not, is disparaging and derisive. He parrots another physician author in mentioning that, “An hysterical girl is, as Wendell Holmes has said in his decisive phrase, a vampire who sucks the blood of the healthy people about her” (Chapter IV). A portion of his essay is devoted to “women who mimic fatigue,” yet his work is suggestive of the whole idea of a nervous disorder as a myth perpetuated by lazy women, by women who would rather lay in bed all day and who find no enjoyment in their lives is “the daily drama of the sick-room, with its little selfishness and its craving for sympathy and indulgence” (Chapter IV and V). Mitchell presents the rest cure almost as just desserts for hypochondriac antics, remarking that when his patients “are bidden to stay in bed a month, and neither to read, write, nor sew, and to have one nurse, who is not a relative,—then repose becomes for some women a rather bitter medicine” (Chapter V, my italics).
Mitchell observes that is the imaginative and emotional women who are most often the sufferers of nervous exhaustion. Gilman’s narrator remarks many times that her imaginative and creative mind is a handicap to her treatment. She looks past the bars on the windows and the shady paths leading across the grounds and can almost imagine people strolling down them. But John is frequently reminds her that “with my imaginative power and habit of story-making, a nervous weakness like mine is sure to lead to all manner of excited fancies, and that I ought to use my will and good sense to check the tendency. So I try.” When she tells him about the wallpaper, he reminds her that “no one but myself can help me out of it, that I must use my will and self-control and not let any silly fancies run away with me.” He begs her, “for my sake and for our child's sake, as well as for your own, that you will never for one instant let that idea enter your mind! There is nothing so dangerous, so fascinating, to a temperament like yours. It is a false and foolish fancy. Can you not trust me as a physician when I tell you so?”
The narrator is a woman who is forced to distrust her body, her mind, her observations, and her emotions. She is infantilized by her physician husband who does not believe in the seriousness of her illness (as anything more than silly fancies), and yet she is told that she is the only one who can make herself well again. The narrative becomes a series of frames within frames echoing the narrator’s confinement and seclusion. She is taken off to the country for (as Mitchell states) there is no treating an hysterical woman in her own home. She is not allowed to read, to write, or to communicate with anyone but her husband, Mary, and Jennie (even though she wants desperately to visit her cousin Harry and Julia). This mental seclusion and “complete rest” is another tenant of Mitchell’s treatment.
The narrator is confined to a room that she did not want to inhabit. She mentions that it had been a nursery, but her description of the room (“Windows barred, wallpaper not within reach, rings on the wall”) is not evocative of a nursery. The bed is fixed in its place and there is a gate at the head of the stairs (perhaps to keep the narrator from throwing herself down them?). At night, she lays awake trying to decipher the pattern of the wallpaper, declaring that in “any kind of light, in twilight, candle light, lamplight, and worst of all by moonlight, it becomes bars! The outside pattern I mean, and the woman behind it is as plain as can be.” She says she is not suicidal, but “To jump out of the window would be admirable exercise, but the bars are too strong even to try… Besides I wouldn't do it. Of course not. I know well enough that a step like that is improper and might be misconstrued.” These thoughts of jumping and of burning the house down to erase the smell of the moldering wallpaper (even the vampire motif of Holmes) cannot help but recall to the mind of the reader the character of another “mad” woman, Bertha in Jane Eyre.
In 1913, Frances Perkins Gilman published “Why I Wrote the Yellow Wallpaper” in The Forerunner. She recounts her 1887 meeting with Mitchell, writing that “This wise man put me to bed and applied the rest cure, to which a still-good physique responded so promptly that he concluded there was nothing much the matter with me, and sent me home with solemn advice 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’ as long as I lived.” It is this dismissal of the severity of mental disorders in women that pervades “The Yellow Wallpaper.” Fortunately for Gilman, she eventually let her emotional responses to the treatment supersede the knowledge of both the “noted specialist in nervous diseases” and her husband.
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