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Abby Callahan

UHON 3000

Dr. Odea

04/22/17

Sickness and Contamination in The Yellow Wallpaper

My goal for this thesis is to closely examine how medicinal treatment for women during

the nineteenth-century affected the writing of Charlotte Perkins Gilmans 1892 short story The

Yellow Wallpaper. Up through the mid nineteenth-century, physicians, who were almost

exclusively male, were not technically required to have a proper license for their practice, though

a proper social standing was necessary to be able to practice medicine (Oppenheim 17). The

Medical Act of 1858 prevented them from self-licensing, but it did not [completely] eliminate

competition from quacks and self-proclaimed healers (Oppenheim 19). This being said, they

would prescribe treatments that were less than helpful to patients but particularly to women

because a womans word was not taken seriously when they said the treatments did nothing to

help. In fact, many of their treatments were contradictory because doctors prescribed different

remedies for the same sickness. Suffering from post-partum depression after the birth of her

daughter, Gilman was treated by one of these famous doctors, Silas Weir Mitchell, whose rest

cure isolated her and would not allow her to do anything physically or mentally challenging.

The Yellow Wallpaper is thus based on her story and experience.

Scholars have focused mainly on the feminism interlaced throughout The Yellow

Wallpaper. For instance, Marry Armfield Hill, Judith A. Allen, and Marianne Hirsch, believe that

the symbols and images throughout Gilmans story encompass the main characters sense of
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being trapped in a marriage filled with condescension and sexism. Yet scholars have not focused

on the idea of contagions, therefore leaving a large gap in research. Hill and Allen in particular

describe the wallpaper itself as a something that traps Gilmans narrator in sexism, yet they do

not look into the medicinal practices reflected through the wallpaper and how it affected

Gilmans narrator as a contagion.

In striking new ground, I will focus on how the description of Gilmans wallpaper

represents the medicinal practices of her time. The knowledge of germs and diseases during the

nineteenth-century was either erroneous or inadequate. While many doctors did not fully

understand that diseases could be spread through physical contact with an infectious object, some

during the time started to consider and investigate the possibility. Reflecting this growing

awareness the wallpaper is a symbol that can demonstrate Gilmans respective belief in

contagions after her experiences with Mitchells rest cure. Throughout her work, Gilman

constantly refers to the pattern in the wallpaper as budding and sprouting mushrooms, and that

the yellow dust it produces is always on their clothes. Even the wallpapers infectious yellow

color that she describes reminds readers of contagion and sickness. The wallpaper does not only

irk Gilmans narrator, however, for her husband also falls prey to the wallpapers effects. In the

end, he faints as if he were sick and the narrator has to [carefully] creep over him every time as

if he were the contagion himself. Women often had to bear the consequences of a mans choice

-good or bad- during the nineteenth-century, and Gilmans story reflects the consequences of

ignoring a patients doubts concerning a treatment received.

Gilman understood that something was awry with the nineteenth-century medical

treatments, and that physicians were severely lacking in key knowledge. She literally

experienced the prolonged effects of their ignorance, and I want to delve deeper into how these
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treatments affected the minds and bodies of female patients. Some of the research that will guide

my argument includes a background on major beliefs, practices, and treatments for mental and

physical health during this period. Scholars Nuland and Davis, for instance, write about Gilmans

growing awareness of contagions and the general importance physicians began to place on

hygiene. These critics will give me insight into how her work functions, and will allow my thesis

to stand out from other articles.

The writing process for this thesis will take my senior year to complete. My goal is to

write at least half of it during the fall of 2017 and the rest during the spring of 2018. While my

introduction will outline by basic argument, the first chapter will give readers a detailed

background of the medical world of the nineteenth-century, allowing them to understand how

contagions became a growing concern for physicians in their efforts to treat patients. The second

chapter will then assess the symbols of contagion, particularly the yellow wallpaper itself, found

throughout Gilmans story, suggesting the ways in which medical misdiagnoses created an

infectious atmosphere that destroyed the minds and bodies of both women and men alike. And,

finally, the conclusion will encourage other writers or researchers to look deeper into the medical

world evoked in Gilmans work.

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Works Cited

Allen, Judith. The Overthrow of Gynaecocentric Culture: Charlotte Perkins Gilman and Lester

Frank Ward. Charlotte Perkins Gilman and Her Contemporaries. Ed. Cynthia J. Davis

and Denise D. Knight. Tuscaloosa: The University of Alabama Press, 2004. Print.

Cane, Aleta Feinsod. The Same Revulsion against Them All: Ida Tarbell and Charlotte Perkins

Gilmans Suffrage Dialogue. Charlotte Perkins Gilman, New Texts, New Contexts. Ed.

Jennifer S. Tuttle and Carol Farley Kessler. Columbus: The Ohio State University Press,

2011. Print.

Davis, Cynthia J. Form Follows Function? Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Re-presentation, and the

Literature of Estrangement. Bodily and Narrative Forms: The Influence of Medicine on

American Literature, 1845-1915. Ed. Cynthia J. Davis. Stanford: Stanford University

Press, 2000. Print.

Fishkin, Shelley Fisher. Feminist Humor and Charlotte Perkins Gilman. Charlotte Perkins

Gilman, New Texts, New Contexts. Ed. Jennifer S. Tuttle and Carol Farley Kessler.

Columbus: The Ohio State University Press, 2011. Print.

Gilman, Charlotte Perkins. The Yellow Wallpaper. Sweden: Wine House Classics, 2016. Print.

Golden, Catherine, ed. The Captive Imagination: A Casebook on The Yellow Wallpaper. New

York: The Feminist Press, 1992. Print.

Karpinski, Jane B. When the Marriage of True Minds Admits Impediments: Charlotte Perkins

Gilman and William Dean Howells. Charlotte Perkins Gilman and Her
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Contemporaries. Ed. Cynthia J. Davis and Denise D. Knight. Tuscaloosa: The University

of Alabama Press, 2004. Print.

Nuland, Sherwin B. The Doctors Plague: Germs, Childbed Fever, and the Strange Story of

Ignac Semmelweis. New York: Norton & Company, 2003. Print.

Oppenheim, Janet. Shattered Nerves: Doctors, Patients, and Depression in Victorian England.

New York: Oxford University Press, 1991. Print.

Wegener, Frederick. Turning The Balsam Fir into Mag Marjorie: Generic Transposition in

Charlotte Perkins Gilmans Imaginative Economy. Charlotte Perkins Gilman: New

Texts, New Contexts. Ed. Jennifer S. Tuttle and Carol Farley Kessler. Columbus: The

Ohio State University Press, 2011. Print.