SOURCE: "The Writing Cure: Women Writers and the Art of Illness," in Invalid Women: Figuring Feminine Illness in American Fiction and Culture, 1840-1940, The University of North Carolina Press, 1993, pp. 110-40.

[In the following excerpt, Herndl discusses invalid women in nineteenth-century American life and literature.]

By the 1870s, the invalid had become such a popular object for both writers and artists that she was one of the most familiar cultural figures. Abba Goold Woolson devoted a whole chapter in Woman in American Society (1873) to "Invalidism as a Pursuit," in which she complained that "the familiar heroines of our books, particularly if described by masculine pens, are petite and fragile, with lily fingers and taper waists.… A sweet-tempered dyspeptic, a little too spiritual for this world and a little too material for the next, and who, therefore, seems always hovering between the two, is the accepted type of female loveliness." In Idols of Perversity, a recent study of turn-of-the-century painting, Bram Dijkstra notes that the same was true of women in art: "Throughout the second half of the nineteenth century, parents, sisters, daughters, and loving friends were kept busy on canvases everywhere, anxiously nursing wan, hollow-eyed beauties who were on the verge of death." Joy Kasson has identified a fascination with the "romantic invalid" in nineteenth-century American sculpture. Wherever women turned in literature, art, medical or religious tracts, or even their own parlors they were confronted with the figure of the invalid woman. Sickly women and, to a lesser extent, sickly men were thought more aesthetically pleasing and interesting than healthy people. As Susan Sontag explains in Illness as Metaphor, the "tubercular" look was fashionable and was considered romantic. Abba Goold Woolson claimed that "with us, to be ladylike is to be lifeless, inane and dawdling.… Instead … of being properly ashamed of physical infirmities, our fine ladies aspire to be called invalides" (Woman in American Society). Women courted ill health in an attempt to be "beautiful," eating arsenic to achieve pale skin, wearing corsets, avoiding exercise. Whether these habits were destructive to women's health (as nineteenth-century feminists claimed), positive expressions of independence and sexuality (as David Kunzle argues in Fashion and Fetishism), or simple signs of continuing human interest in appearance and eroticism (as Valerie Steele contends in Fashion and Eroticism) ultimately may be impossible to tell. What we can know for sure is that in the mid- to late nineteenth century, illness became not only the subject of art but itself a kind of cosmetic art.

The invalid was not the only model of womanhood offered in the late nineteenth century, however. By the late 1880s and through the turn of the century, thousands of women were rejecting the cultural stereotype of woman as weak and sickly. Through both feminist and domestic social housekeeping movements women were becoming activists. They were entering both the professional world and the world of social work, thereby forming increasingly important political forces. Educated and intelligent women had more options than ever; as a result, though, it was incredibly difficult to define a proper womanly role. In Imaging American Women, Martha Banta claims that "the images by which ideas about the American female were being offered to the public between 1876 and 1918 were … varied to the point of potential self-contradiction."

Feminists were more organized than they had been in the middle of the century to respond to claims that female physiology stood in the way of women's political progress, but they were still worried by doctors' claims and uncertain about their own assertions of strength. M. Carey Thomas, who headed Bryn Mawr College, looking back to the 1870s, wrote in 1908, "We did not know when we began whether women's health could stand the strain of education." (quoted in Mary Walsh, "Doctors Wanted: No Women Need Apply,") The medical discourse had grown so powerful in the late nineteenth century that even feminists had begun to doubt their own claims.

One influential physician who was sure that women could not stand the strain of equality was Dr. Edward H. Clarke, who published Sex in Education; or, A Fair Chance for the Girls in 1873. He argued that menstruation necessitated regular rest periods that would make it impossible for girls to receive an equal education with boys. Perhaps no other work so solidified the feminist resistance to male medical pronouncements; an almost instant best-seller, Sex in Education nonetheless elicited a deluge of counterattacks. Julia Ward Howe edited a volume of replies to Dr. Clarke in 1874, and at least three other collections of feminist responses were published that year. More importantly, Clarke's claims led to the first scientific study of women, menstruation, and education: Mary Putnam Jacobi's The Question of Rest for Women During Menstruation (1877), which concluded that normal work was more beneficial to menstruating women than was bed rest. Feminists finally found the means to make their resistance to medical definitions of woman as invalid coherent. Clarke's monograph ultimately had the effect of strengthening the feminist opposition to medical practice.

Given the climate of activism, change, and conflict at the turn of the century, one would expect to find that fictions written by active and productive women who had, themselves, overcome invalidism would represent equally active and productive women who defy the stereotype of the invalid woman. Instead, in fictions like Charlotte Perkins Gilman's "The Yellow Wallpaper" (1891) and Edith Wharton's The House of Mirth (1905), we find the same passive and defeated invalid that had figured in the fictions of Southworth, Hawthorne, and Poe fifty years earlier. Despite the fact that Gilman and Wharton themselves worked hard to avoid invalidism, they nonetheless continued to create female figures in their fiction that appear strikingly similar to the earlier ones. The woman in "The Yellow Wallpaper," like Poe's women, goes mad and, apparently, takes her husband with her. Even though, as Annette Kolodny argues in "A Map for Rereading," her story is a "willful and purposeful misprision" of "The Pit and the Pendulum" that emphasizes that Gilman's narrator cannot be "released to both sanity and freedom" as can Poe's, it nonetheless leaves the figure of the invalid woman as drawn by Poe intact—driven insane by her intellectual needs. In the same way, Lily Bart in The House of Mirth, like Georgiana in "The Birthmark," Beatrice in "Rappaccini's Daughter," and Zenobia in The Blithedale Romance, dies at the end of the story, her body serving as an edifying object for the male gaze.

The apparently stable figure of the invalid woman in turn-of-the-century women's fictions is related specifically to issues of women's power through and over illness. Much recent feminist criticism of "The Yellow Wallpaper" and The House of Mirth has evaded the questions about individual power these texts specifically raise, celebrating the power of the author even though the texts work to challenge the possibilities for individual action. While much medical treatment at the turn of the century was still "somatic," that is, treating all ailments (even mental ones) with physical cures, theories stressing the power of mind over body came into prominence during the 1890s and 1900s. Physicians and laypeople alike were fascinated with "mental illnesses"—both insanity and psychosomatic illnesses—and with new cures that sought to directly treat the mind. "Mind cures" ("New Thought" as well as neurology and psychology) developed the idea that the individual has the ability to control his or her mind and therefore his or her body, regardless of environmental factors or social inequities. These medical and social theories emphasized the power of the individual rather than the normative power of society, so that illness became a mark of individual, not social, failure—of individual, not societal, "dis-ease."

Many of these new mind cures were religious in origin, like Mary Baker Eddy's Christian Science, and sought cure through belief. Others were secular or only vaguely religious, celebrating a "life force" or an "All-Supply" of energy. For the purposes of this discussion, I will refer to both the religious and the secular mind cures as "New Thought," as they were called at the time. Perhaps the simplest definition of New Thought was set out in the purpose statement of an early New Thought group, the Metaphysical Club of Boston, in 1895: "To promote interest in and the practice of a true philosophy of life and happiness; to show that through right thinking one's loftiest ideals may be brought into present realization; and to advance intelligent and systematic treatment of disease by spiritual and mental methods." (quoted in Charles Braden, Spirits in Rebellion). New Thought eventually became the medical equivalent of the economic individualism urged in the "success" literature at the turn of the century. Elizabeth Towne, who published her own religious New Thought poetry with the New Thought Publishing Company, started a publishing house and printed Bruce MacLelland's Prosperity through Thought and Force (1907), a treatise that explained how to use New Thought to achieve wealth as well as health. Just as one could rise on the corporate ladder with hard work and willpower, so, too, could one achieve perfect health. The discourse of self-help, mind over matter, and willed health may have provided Gilman and Wharton with the chance to effect for themselves a "writing cure," a personal version of Freud's "talking cure," that was related to New Thought.

Nonetheless, in "The Yellow Wallpaper" and The House of Mirth, Gilman and Wharton resist this representation of the individual's capacity for health. Instead, they portray seriously "sick" societies in which social and sexual oppression makes women ill. But these writers' own experiences of "willed" health, as well as their immersion in contemporary culture, make it impossible for them to maintain a consistent stance: the New Thought that had saved the writers indicts their heroines. Illness in these texts becomes, then, a matter of both subversion and collusion. Illness becomes a way to resist the sexist norms of nineteenth-century society, a specifically feminine form of revolt against male control, and a sign of real health in a sick world. At the same time that Gilman and Wharton celebrate this kind of resistance almost to the point of glorifying victimage they also condemn the women who allow their own victimization. Illness also becomes, then, a sign of acceptance of patriarchal power. As Deirdre David argues of George Eliot in Intellectual Women and Victorian Patriarchy, Gilman and Wharton were "collaborateurs" and "saboteurs" whose heroines' ends help reconcile the writers' ambiguous attitudes to past and present, to the male and female traditions in fiction, and to the ideology of "self-advancement" through "disciplined work."

By the turn of the century "New Women" and suffragists had begun to challenge Victorian stereotypes of femininity. Of course, most women were not "New Women." Even at the height of the first women's movement, only a very small percentage of women (around 4-5 percent) actually went to college (although by 1910, 40 percent of all college students were women [Glenda Riley, Inventing the American Woman]) and only about half of female college graduates went on to actively pursue professional careers. (ibid. and Carroll Smith Rosenberg, Disorderly Conduct) Still, 17 percent of all women were in the work force in 1900—four times as many as there had been in 1870. Another of the major changes in the lives of late nineteenth-century women was their involvement in various reform movements. After the Civil War, many were involved in actively feminist causes, but even greater numbers of women led, organized, and staffed social housekeeping campaigns like the temperance movement, care for orphans and veterans, urban planning, aid for the poor, and educational and health reform. Some women undertook these causes as active feminists. Most, however, saw their activism as consistent with the ideology of domesticity: they were expanding their role as moral guides from the nursery and kitchen to the world outside the home.

One of the most active of these reform movements was aimed at health; these activists read the dire assessments of women's failing health and, guided both by feminism and by domesticity, determined to do something about it. Following in the footsteps of Mary Gove Nichols, health reformers like Dorothea Dix, Marie Zakrzewska, Elizabeth Blackwell, Jane Addams, Margaret Sanger, and Mary Putnam Jacobi, to mention but a few of the most famous, were instrumental in reforms of health and medicine (see Regina Morantz-Sanchez, Sympathy and Science, and Judith Leavitt, Women and Health in America). They founded hospitals; advocated dress reform, diet reform, health education, better hygiene, and birth control; and fought for reforms in regular medical practice that became standard policy by the mid-twentieth century. Women's movements of various kinds caused great changes in nineteenth-century culture, but a side effect of those reforms was increased contradiction among differing definitions of "woman's proper sphere." More than ever, women declared themselves fit to hold responsible positions outside the home; more than ever, medical authorities decried the public health dangers created when women devoted themselves to activities other than mothering.

Turn-of-the-century medical authorities by no means presented a unified front, however. The profession was still fragmented by differing theories of disease and treatment. Until the discovery of bacteria and specific etiology for disease at the end of the nineteenth century, allopathy was only one among many competing techniques. "Irregular" practices, like homeopathy, hydropathy, Grahamism, mind cure, and eclecticism, seemed pretty much equal at the time. Self-doctoring, accomplished with the help of the growing patent medicine business, was much in vogue. The medical profession was further fragmented by the entry of a fair number of women into active competition. By 1900, 6 percent of the practicing physicians in the United States were women; in some cities, like Boston and Minneapolis, women accounted for 20 percent of the physicians (Morantz Sanchez, "So Honoured, So Loved?"). These women served as living proof against the accepted "regular" medical position that women were not strong enough to be professionals or to step outside limited roles in the family.

A decades-old (if not centuries-old) belief does not die easily. Despite growing evidence that women could leave the home and not face life-long suffering and despite new theories of disease based on a medical model of specific etiology rather than closed energy, male physicians continued to caution against women taking on roles outside the home. Many of these medical authorities turned their attention from specific physical ailments to interest in "nervous diseases." Late nineteenth-century physicians were fascinated by mental disorders. In Europe, this fascination would lead to Freud's development of psychoanalysis; in the United States, it led to S. Weir Mitchell's development of the "rest cure" and William James's Psychology, as well as the proliferation of mind cures.

The second half of the nineteenth century saw an unprecedented increase in the diagnosis of "nervous" illnesses. Medical and cultural observers everywhere noted the staggering and ever-increasing numbers of people (male and female) who suffered from ailments grouped under the general label "nervousness." Edward Wakefield, a physician writing in McClure's Magazine in 1893, called nervousness the "national disease of America." Despite studies showing no rise in the actual incidence of insanity between 1885 and 1910, neurologists like George M. Beard and S. Weir Mitchell, among many others, believed that nervousness posed an imminent threat to modern civilization. Not surprisingly, the diagnosis of "nervousness" often represented cultural attitudes toward both disease and its sufferers; similar symptoms in men and women, the rich and the poor, those of American stock and those who had recently immigrated, were attributed to different causes. Therefore, while recent immigrants and the poor went insane, members of the upper middle class most often became "nervous." One study reveals that in 1911 the foreign-born were almost twice as likely as the native-born to be committed to insane asylums in New York State (Nathan Hale, Freud and the Americans). Middle-class men, no matter the severity of their symptoms, were most often described as having "neurasthenia," a disease newly discovered (or at least named) by Beard in 1869; middle-class women, too, were often diagnosed as neurasthenic, but if the symptoms were more severe, especially if they included "paroxysms" or "fits," women were described as "hysteric" and the blame for the disease was placed on their sexual organs (as the etymology of the word hysteria—from the Greek hyster, meaning "womb"—suggests).

Neurasthenia was the disease of the upper middle classes; almost any symptom could be a sign of it (the same was true of hysteria for middle-class and upper middle-class women). Robin and John Haller describe it in The Physician and Sexuality in Victorian America as the late nineteenth-century "pathological dumping ground for moralists within and outside the medical world." Almost anything, from tenderness of the scalp, forgetfulness, and ticklishness to dyspepsia, insomnia, and abnormal secretions, could be a sign of neurasthenia; in a few cases, impotence, headaches, yawning, and depression were also symptoms. Nineteenth-century physicians, influenced by Herbert Spencer's Social Darwinism, believed that neurasthenia in a man was the result of a too-speedy evolution from physical to mental work; his illness, though certainly not pleasant, was nonetheless a sign of his "higher" evolution and, therefore, at least tolerable. Many neurologists and psychologists, including Weir Mitchell and William James, were themselves sufferers of neurasthenia.

Nervousness in women, on the other hand, did not have such a specific etiology. Neurasthenia and hysteria, as one encounters them in medical writings of the time, seem to differ only in the severity of symptoms, but that, too, varies from doctor to doctor and among patients. (I will use "nervousness" to refer to mental ailments unless the context calls for a specific designation of either neurasthenia or hysteria.) Nervousness was sometimes understood in the same light as male neurasthenia: troubling but a sign of good breeding and intellectual achievement. More often, though, nervousness was interpreted as female inadequacy to deal with any intellectual endeavor at all and a tendency toward the more severe disease, hysteria. Nineteenth-century physicians believed male neurasthenia was the result of man's ever more demanding role in society, while female neurasthenia was the result of her inadequate brain capacity for dealing with complex thought and roles outside of the home (Haller and Haller, The Physician and Sexuality in Victorian America).

Nor was cause the only gender differentiation in neurasthenia. Treatment for male nervousness was increased activity, a return to physical exertion that was seen to counteract too much mental exertion. This treatment signaled the beginnings of a changed attitude about the relation between mind and body. Unlike the mid-nineteenth-century belief in the necessity of shepherding energy, new theories advocated balancing energies and even building energies in the treatment of men. But physicians most often suggested an intensified domesticity as the "cure" to female nervousness, assuming that domestic life was more peaceful than the world outside the home. If the disease were caused by overexertion, rest could be its only cure and a quiet life the only way to prevent it. One could describe the rest cure, which kept women not just at home but in bed in their rooms, as an almost parodic exaggeration of domesticity. Even some women physicians advocated a return to the domestic sphere for nervous women (see Morantz-Sanchez, "So Honoured, So Loved?," and Haller and Haller, The Physician and Sexuality in Victorian America). As Tom Lutz observes in American Nervousness, 1903, "Both cures [for women and for men] were represented in terms of a return to traditional values of passive femininity and masculine activity." Domesticity, which had begun as a woman-led movement to establish feminine power within the home, became by the turn of the century the means for doctors to confine women there. The suturing of difference between medical and domestic ideologies that we saw at work in Southworth's Retribution had, by an intensification of their similarities and a dismissal of their differences, become a tool for doctors to use to extend their own cultural and professional influence. (This occurred despite the extension of one kind of domesticity out of the home into "social housekeeping" reforms.)

Some physicians, however, suggested that female neurasthenia might be the result of boredom and idleness; one such physician, Herbert Hall, argued in 1905 that neurasthenia most often happened to creative women who were generally more clever and artistic than other people (Haller and Haller, The Physician and Sexuality in Victorian America). Even those who held this theory of the disease, however, usually suggested not professional or artistic work but charity work. Whatever their theory, though, theorists of nervousness agreed that it was somehow a culturally induced disease. "Their descriptions of the commonest nervous disorders of women and men emphasized conflicts within individuals who could not fulfill social norms, yet, because they had internalized them, could not consciously reject them" (Hale, Freud and the Americans).

Regular, allopathic, treatments for neurasthenia between about 1880 and 1910 were usually physically oriented. Nathan Hale, in Freud and the Americans, has characterized medical treatment during this period as the "somatic style" because it sought to treat mental ailments by exclusively physical means. Weir Mitchell, a pioneer in the field of neurological treatment, argued against what we would today identify as mental treatment. While he recognized that the causes of patients' ailments "are often to be sought in the remote past" and that patients will tell their physician "more than he may care to hear," Mitchell did not advocate eliciting such "confessions" (Mitchell, Doctor and Patient). It will surprise modern skeptics to learn that the somatic style did achieve notable results; rest, diet, exercise, electrical stimulation, hydropathy, and drugs often worked wonders. These means did not, though, work as well as the claims made for them; many patients tried doctor after doctor, treatment after treatment, and still found no real relief. This dissatisfaction led to widespread experimentation with "irregular" treatments, many of which were genuinely mentally oriented; hypnosis and New Thought were extremely popular during this period. According to Hale, "medical and popular interest in hypnosis, suggestion, mental healing and multiple personality peaked in the early 1890s, declined slightly after 1895, then waxed rapidly after 1900" (Freud and the Americans).

These new kinds of cures share some characteristics with the earlier somatic cures, especially with Mitchell's "rest cure." This is not particularly surprising since many curists started out as neurologists or as the patients of neurologists. The most significant aspect of all the cures—whether rest cure, hypnosis, hydropathy, dietetic treatment, or New Thought—was a confidence that nervous illness was a matter of an intent to be ill, that if the patient decided to be well, she could be. Weir Mitchell rejected almost all of the new psychotherapeutics, but his treatment reveals an attitude towards nervous disease that suggests, at root, an understanding of illness as intentional and of cure, therefore, as a matter of will. His cure's aim was to instill the self-discipline to fight against the "moral failures" of "selfish invalidism." New Thought, while holding that cure could be achieved by "floating in harmony" with the deity, nevertheless encouraged its practitioners to "hit hard and win" against illness (Gail Parker, Mind Cure in New England). Freud, at least in his earlier works, shared this attitude and even extended it. In the "Dora" case, he discusses "motives of illness," noting that some diseases are "the result of intention" and even weapons "as a rule leveled at a particular person." He further notes: "The crudest and most commonplace views upon the character of hysterical disorders such as are to be heard from uneducated relatives or nurses are in a certain sense right. It is true that the paralysed and bed-ridden woman would spring to her feet if a fire were to break out in her room and that the spoiled wife would forget all her sufferings if her child were to fall dangerously ill or if some catastrophe were to threaten the family circumstances" (Complete Psychological Works). Arguing that the "intention to be ill' is an unconscious rather than conscious process, Freud nevertheless asserts that in many hysterical diseases, a prerequisite to cure is "an attempt … to convince the patient herself of the existence in her of an intention to be ill."

The attitude that illness was the result of the will to be ill developed from the rethinking of the relation between mind and body that occurred at the turn of the century. Many late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century physicians and psychologists agreed with the idea described in an early article by William James called "We Are Automata" (1879): "Feeling is a mere collateral product of our nervous processes, unable to react upon them any more than a shadow reacts on the steps of the traveler whom it accompanies.… It is allowed to remain on board, but not to touch the helm or handle the rigging" (quoted in Hale, Freud and the Americans). But a larger number, including James himself in later works, were fascinated by the possibilities that the mind and body were not as profoundly split as philosophers had suggested since Descartes. The effect of questioning the mind/body split was the burgeoning of a whole new attitude toward the power of the mind to make the body ill and, in turn, to cure it.

In the United States, this attitude reflected a refinement and scientific verification of transcendentalism adapted to an age of pragmatism. Practitioners of New Thought saw Emanuel Swedenborg and Ralph Waldo Emerson as their immediate precursors and would find an ally of sorts in William James. Like transcendentalism, New Thought explicitly rejected the Calvinist religion of sin and death and substituted instead a faith in an "All-Supply" of light and hope. New Thought taught that disease was a man-made entity, because God would never have created something so bad. In complete agreement with the position Emerson propounded in "The Transcendentalist," New Thought maintained that changing one's thinking would change one's reality. Unlike transcendentalism, though, New Thought was both pragmatic and active; practitioners and patients believed in it because they saw its results, and they saw themselves not as passive recipients of the deity (the "transparent eyeball") but as active workers, trying to achieve the diety's will in the world.

The activism of New Thought, its insistence that one must work hard for health, reveals its ties with the reform and self-help movements of the day, reflecting the strong American faith in the individual's ability to determine his or her own fate. One of the most popular mind cure authors, Orison Swett Marden, published the self-help journal Success (a publication, incidentally, for which Charlotte Perkins Gilman wrote frequently). Marden's work altered the focus of success literature from instructions in how to achieve professional success to "a call for methodical character-building" (Parker, Mind Cure in New England). One of the most important proponents of a kind of New Thought, Mary Baker Eddy, extended the reformism and woman-centeredness of domesticity. She used women's social reforms as patterns for self-reform, their control of the household as a model for self-control. She developed the domestic notion that woman could best direct the moral life of the nation into a belief that women were the chosen of God (see Gail Parker, "Mary Baker Eddy and Sentimental Womanhood"). Mind cure, in most of its forms, united several turn-of-the-century reformist and materialistic movements; it combined women's rights, health, and social reforms with a determination to "succeed" worthy of a Horatio Alger novel.

The popularity of mind cure and various other psychotherapies was supported and extended by the new style of sensational mass journalism. Journalists, many of whom had themselves been "saved" by the revolutionary mental therapies, extolled the virtues of the treatments. This journalistic fervor for mental cures was the strongest in women's magazines (Hale, Freud and the Americans). In fact, women were quite involved with the New Thought movement, finding in its teachings an outlet for their ambitions and beliefs. Many feminists discovered that it could prove to be a philosophical basis for their demand to be treated as equals as well as a relief from the prevailing sexism of medical treatment. Elizabeth Cady Stanton was an early proponent of mind cure, urging that a woman should become her "own physician of body and soul" (quoted in Parker, Mind Cure in New England).

New Thought helped provide the discourse for a coherent and articulate critique of the medical profession that had been lacking in earlier decades.… "Mind cure became one outlet for an articulate feminism that demanded equal access to positions of spiritual leadership, freedom from the pretensions of a male medical elite, and the right to use sexual intercourse (as experienced by women) to depict the relationship between mortals and the All-Supply [the deity]" (Parker, Mind Cure in New England). In New Thought, women found a way to take their cure into their own hands, a way to try to avoid the patriarchal dicta of the medical men. Many other women embraced it merely because it offered a cure for their ailments, but once they had been cured, they often joined the crusade for mental healing. Mary Baker Eddy is perhaps the most famous of these women, but she is far from alone; the health reformer Annie Payson Call, the popular poet Ella Wheeler Wilcox, and popular mind cure authors Elizabeth Towne and Mary Ferriter were but a few of the other women who took mind cure as their personal crusade.

Other women, many of them "regular" physicians and feminists, also argued that women should take charge of their own lives, direct their own health, and resist the cultural tendency to seek femininity through illness. Abba Goold Woolson spoke for many when she argued for health education and a reform in the attitudes toward sickness and health: "When women shall learn to desire good health as essential to both beauty and efficiency, and shall look upon their present pernicious indulgences as not only inexpedient but as morally wrong, we may hope to see our people taking a vast stride in all departments of progress" (Woman in American Society). As early as the 1840s, Mary Gove Nichols had urged the same; by the turn of the century, women's health reformers following in Nichols's footsteps continually exhorted women to take charge of their lives and health.

One of the most famous women who took up this call for better health through self-discipline was Charlotte Perkins Gilman. In her autobiography, she claims to have cured herself by working and writing, despite her doctor's orders to stop both activities (The Living of Charlotte Perkins Gilman). She claimed that it was writing, especially, that had returned her to health and that had helped other women to follow her example. Gilman had been a victim of "nervousness" throughout her childhood and continued to suffer periodic bouts throughout the rest of her life. But shortly after the birth of her first (and only) child, her symptoms worsened and she feared a complete breakdown. As is well known by now from the numerous studies of "The Yellow Wallpaper" and Weir Mitchell's rest cure, Gilman rejected Mitchell's advice to "never touch pen, brush, or pencil" and to "live as domestic a life as possible" (The Living of Charlotte Perkins Gilman), in favor of a life of writing, public speaking, and feminist crusading. Gilman later claimed that "The Yellow Wallpaper" had even convinced Mitchell to change his rest cure to include, for some patients, the chance to write.

One of the beneficiaries of this change was Edith Wharton. Wharton, like Gilman, was a sufferer of "nervousness"; she had suffered a serious breakdown in 1894-95, and when she felt another coming on in early 1898, she went to Weir Mitchell's clinic in Philadelphia for treatment (she was, however, an outpatient and was treated by one of his colleagues, not by Mitchell himself [R. W. B. Lewis, Edith Wharton: A Biography]). While there, like most rest cure patients, she was isolated, forced to rest and eat abundantly, given massages, and, unlike Gilman, encouraged to write. R. W. B. Lewis rebuts the "legend" that Wharton began writing during the rest cure as a mode of therapy (a claim mentioned and accorded respect by Suzanne Poirier in "The Weir Mitchell Rest Cure"), pointing out that she had published enough for a small volume before her first breakdown, but he admits that 1898 marks the beginning of her sustained career as a writer. Wharton may not have learned to write from her cure, but she did learn that writing could be encompassed in a cure and did not have to be, as Lewis suggests it had been, illness inducing.

Gilman and Wharton found that writing could be curative, whether they had consciously undertaken it as therapy or not. It became for them their own independent form of mind cure because it allowed them to "remake their circumstances," to change their "thoughts and motives" in order to transform their "conditions and economies." It also seemed to work; Gilman was never entirely free of her nervousness, but after becoming an active writer and speaker, she never suffered from it to the same degree as she had earlier. Wharton became healthier in direct relation to her success as an author. But in the texts that mark each woman's emergence as an important writer, the fictions generally accepted as their first "masterpieces," the female characters are not granted the authors' newly won health. The woman in "The Yellow Wallpaper" descends dramatically into a complete breakdown just as Gilman ascends from the threat of a breakdown; in The House of Mirth, Lily Bart's physical health deteriorates as a result of her increasing depression. She falls into a cycle of insomnia and drug abuse and finally succumbs to an overdose that may or may not be accidental. The defeat of these female characters may well have been the price of Gilman's and Wharton's own victories over illness and invalidism. In writing the story of the invalid, they were able to avoid living it.

In The Madwoman in the Attic, Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar argue that the activity of writing, or producing art, was fraught with anxiety for most nineteenth-century women. They argue that the lively or imaginative girl growing up in the nineteenth century was "likely to experience her education in docility, submissiveness, selflessness as in some sense sickening. To be trained in renunciation is almost necessarily to be trained to ill health, since the human animal's first and strongest urge is to his/her own survival, pleasure, assertion … Learning to become a beautiful object, the girl learns anxiety about perhaps even loathing of her own flesh." This is the reason, they contend, that so many women in the nineteenth century were ill. Gubar, in "'The Blank Page' and the Issues of Female Creativity," argues that "many women experience their own bodies as the only available medium for art"; she associates this art of the body with blood and pain. She argues that women who have not been allowed the education or opportunity to write, paint, or sculpt have learned to make art of their bodies through clothing, makeup, and their shapes: "The woman who cannot become an artist can nevertheless turn herself into an artistic object." For Gilbert and Gubar, making art of the body is itself illness inducing.

In contrast to this view, David Kunzle and Valerie Steele argue that learning to turn herself into an art object was, for the Victorian woman, a way of taking control over her own body. Kunzle goes much further on this point than Steele; he argues that Victorian men were, if anything, against the corsets, cosmetics, and elaborate dresses worn by Victorian women. He sees such body shaping as forms of sexual expression and self-assertion, even of independence from male norms. In his view, it was the corseted lady, not the feminist, who was the real sexual radical in the nineteenth century. Steele's view is more moderate than Kunzle's—in part because her research leads her to believe that reports of corset wearing and tight lacing have been much exaggerated—but she contends that the art of fashion has always been a healthy way to express self and sexuality and accepts the idea that nineteenth-century fashions were, at least in part, a way for women to express self-control rather than male control.

If we allow that illness could be a kind of "cosmetic" for women, as Abba Goold Woolson claimed it was, and if the cosmetic arts were a way to rebel against male control, then illness itself could become both an art and a form of rebellion against patriarchy. The woman who grew up with nineteenth-century standards of moral and social conduct would then have found illness a congenial role in several ways. First, if she, like the women Gilbert and Gubar describe, came to loathe her own flesh, she could punish that flesh with illness. But if she also discovered that the illness with which she punished her body was aesthetically pleasing, then she could turn her self-punishment into art. In this way, the woman who had grown up with fiction and visual arts that exalted the holy and beautiful illnesses of female characters could come to experience suffering and making her body ill as artistic activities. For the woman caught between medical discourses that defined her as ill, aesthetic discourses which asserted that she was better that way, and New Thought arguments that she could take control of her own life and urged her to do so, the self-discipline of willed and artistic illness could offer the simplest resolution to these competing forces.

Making an art of illness, then, represents one extreme kind of self-control. If illness can be understood as a kind of artistic self-discipline, a way of taking control of one's own body, of "working" it to artistic ends, then illness can be both a matter of art and of self-punishment, a way of enjoying and loathing the flesh. In Discipline and Punish, Michel Foucault argues that punishment, as a part of discipline, "has the function of reducing gaps. It must therefore be essentially corrective.… Disciplinary systems favour punishments that are exercise intensified, multiplied forms of training." If illness comes to be a discipline, then, it can be both punishment and art. It can be either an art intensified into punishment or a punishment meant to "correct" imperfections of the body. It can therefore be both collusion with moral and social standards that oppress women and a subversion of those standards at the same time. The woman who makes an art of her illness accedes to her "place" in a patriarchal system, but she controls that place.

Alice James may serve as an illuminating case in point. She writes repeatedly in her Diary of "achieving" illness and of "getting herself dead" as a feat equal to or surpassing Henry's and William's writing. Jean Strouse, Alice James's biographer, argues that Alice maintained a kind of "negative superiority" about her illness. "All her life Alice had been in conflict over just who she could be.… The intelligence and energy Alice might have used in some productive way went into the intricate work of being sick.… Her miserable health was her career" (Alice James: A Biography). And Ruth Bernard Yeazell writes, "Alice retired permanently to her bed and took up the profession of an invalid" (The Death and Letters of Alice James). At one point, quoting "un ange philosophe," she explicitly describes suffering as a way to make one's life a work of art: "Sous cette inspiration [souffrance] les existences les plus humbles peuvent devenir des oeuvres d'art bien supdrieures aux plus belles symphonies et aux plus beaux poemes. Est-ce que les oeuvres d'art qu'on realise en soi-même ne sont pas meilleures? Les autres, qu'on jette en dehors sur la toile ou le papier, ne sont rien que des images, des ombres. L'oeuvre de la vie est un realite." Alice's "work" was directed destructively at her own body, not exactly as punishment but as self-discipline, as making a work of art of her life. It was this destructive, punishing work that allowed her to construct a sense of self and self-control. The self she defined was ill; the one piece of writing she published in her lifetime, a letter to the editor of The Nation (4 July 1890), was signed "Invalid." Alice's writing of her diary was an extension of this work, not a revision of it, because she attempted to write herself, as invalid, into it.

Writing could then be an extension of illness-as-art. Gilbert and Gubar claim that it was the stress of making art that caused women writers' illnesses in the nineteenth century, that moving from the "feminine" art of the body to the "masculine" art of the pen was illness inducing. But it seems more likely that illness and writing exist not as opposing options for women but as different points along a continuum of artistic self-discipline. Therefore, as a woman began to make other kinds of art, she no longer needed to experience her sense of art through making herself ill. Ironically, then, the best way to overcome the sense that one's body and illness are the only media for art would be to make art in other ways. Illness would, then, resume its original character as punishment, not self-discipline, not art. Gilman and Wharton both came to believe that writing made them feel better—Wharton had, in fact, used "making up" stories as a kind of a therapy since she had been a child (see Cynthia Wolff, A Feast of Words). This was true of other women writers, too. Kate Chopin consciously took up writing as therapy for the depression she experienced after her husband's and mother's deaths, and even Alice James believed that writing her Diary helped to relieve her illness.

Writing and making art also were part of the prescription offered by female mind curists to women. Harriott K. Hunt, one of the first female physicians in this country (although she never attended a medical school because none would admit her), was one of Mary Baker Eddy's early proponents and wrote in her autobiography, Glances and Glimpses, that her treatment of women consisted of "telling [them] to throw away their medicines, begin a diary, and think of their mothers" (quoted in Ann Douglas Wood, "The Fashionable Diseases,"). Mary Ferriter, a popular mind cure author, wrote in 1923: "Tell the girl that every twenty-eight days she will have a call from nature and that then she will have the sex urge, or the creature instinct, strong upon her; that then is the time for her to express in art, music, poetry" (from Truth of Life Love Liberty, quoted in Gail Parker, Mind Cure in New England). Gilman and Wharton, who were both extensively exposed to New Thought philosophy, undoubtedly internalized some of this thinking, especially when they found it so successful.

This "writing cure" would, of course, have been coincident with Freud's development of the "talking cure," through which patients were able to speak their anxiety and stop directing it internally. It also parallels much current feminist psychoanalytic theory about the role of language in effecting cures. Psychoanalysts like Luce Irigaray and Michele Montrelay argue that women growing up in a world dominated by masculine signifying systems often lack the necessary representational structures to articulate sexuality and anxiety: "Women do not manage to articulate their madness: they suffer it directly in their body" (Irigaray, quoted in Diana Adlam and Couze Venn, "Women's Exile"). Language, the "pure cathexis in the word as such," they argue, allows the woman to turn painful experiences into a discourse in which "words are other" than herself (Montrelay, "Of Femininity"). Freud wrote that "hysterics suffer mainly from reminiscences" (Complete Psychological Works). Irigaray and Montrelay argue that by articulating those reminiscences, women no longer have to live them.

For women writing at the turn of the century, this "writing cure" went further than just articulating painful reminiscences, though. It also fundamentally changed the woman's role. As Jonathan Culler puts it, women have historically been the subject of literature, or the inspiration for literature, but not the subject who writes literature (On Deconstruction). But in becoming a writer, a woman comes to inhabit an altogether different position in society and history. Writing about illness, then, allows the woman writer to separate the experience of it from herself; becoming a writer who creates narratives of illness allows her to control it, to avoid experiencing the sickness herself. Unlike Alice James, who merely wrote her self into her text as invalid, Gilman and Wharton wrote the illness into their texts, leaving themselves apart from it, as authors, not invalid women.

By writing, Gilman and Wharton produced irrefutable evidence of their changed position from invalid women to writers: a visible, material creation that attests to their activity. In Discipline and Punish, Foucault maintains that "disciplinary power … is exercised through its invisibility; at the same time it imposes on those whom it subjects a principle of compulsory visibility." This visibility, he argues, allows them to be controlled. In "The Yellow Wallpaper" and The House of Mirth, Gilman and Wharton try to make the disciplinary power of patriarchy visible, to reveal the painful effects of women's compulsory visibility (both female characters are "watched"), and to redefine that visibility in the process, in favor of something that can stand for the woman writer herself—the writing.

The "writing cure" is a remedy that provides a way for the woman writer to present her illness so that it is "written and simultaneously erased, metaphorized; designating itself while indicating intraworldly relations; it [is] represented" (Jacques Derrida, "Freud and the Scene of Writing"). The writing she produces will take her place in two ways, then: first, it can be Other, it can represent the illness she no longer has to embody, and second, it can represent her in her absence. But like the pharmakon, writing is a cure that is also a poison because to cure the woman writer, it must kill the invalid woman.

Both "The Yellow Wallpaper" and The House of Mirth center on female characters who are in some sense frustrated artists, trapped in an ugly and uncomfortable world that does not allow them viable alternatives to the traditional world of wifehood and motherhood. These two women, the narrator of "The Yellow Wallpaper" and Lily Bart, therefore turn their artistic urges destructively on themselves. Both Gilman and Wharton refuse the ideal of feminine domesticity in these narratives and, with it, the traditional happy endings of women's fiction. Both narratives reject domestic ideology—marriage and the home do not provide a happy alternative to the heroine's problems—and domestic narrative structure—the heroine does not save herself from an exterior threat but succumbs to an interior one. The emphasis both texts place on art and the rejection of dominant ideology is important to the notion of a "writing cure" and to the place of these narratives in feminist literary history.

"The Yellow Wallpaper" is written in first-person narrative, in the form of the journal of a nameless woman who has been taken to an "ancestral hall," "a hereditary estate," to spend the summer on a modified rest cure while recuperating from some "nervous" condition. Since the narrator remains nameless—she neither mentions her own name nor records anyone calling her by name—she seems not to experience herself as a subject but as a wife, her child's mother, a "sick" woman, or as "a woman" in the "hereditary estate" of all women, which, under patriarchy, makes women sick.

While the woman maintains that she is sick, her husband, a physician, maintains that she is not. This contradiction of her experience leaves her confused; as she puts it, "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?" She is "absolutely forbidden to 'work' until [she is] well again," even though she is told she is not sick and even though she disagrees with the prescription: "Personally, I believe that congenial work, with excitement and change, would do me good. But what is one to do?"

Throughout the story, her doctor-husband contradicts her representations of reality and imposes his representations on her. She tells him she feels something strange and ghostly in the house, and he says it is a draught and closes the window. Confessing that her "nervous troubles are dreadfully depressing," she states, "John does not know how much I really suffer. He knows there is no reason to suffer, and that satisfies him.… Nobody would believe what an effort it is to do what little I am able." She does, however, keep trying to tell John how she feels. In every case, he tells her she is wrong, that he knows better than she what is true for her. Still, she tries to maintain her role as speaking and desiring subject, even though John continues to treat her as a child—as infans, the one who does not speak, the one who is to be taken care of. She tries to tell him that she "is not gaining" and that she wants to leave the old house; John's response is, as we might expect, "Of course, if you were in any danger, I could and would, but you really are better, dear, whether you can see it or not. I am a doctor, dear, and I know" (emphasis added).

Despite these repeated instances reinforcing her idea that "nobody would believe" her, she continues trying to tell someone. Her writing of the journal we read is one indication of this attempt to continue representing, even though it is the very work she has been told not to do. She is, at least initially, trying to somehow maintain her subjectivity despite male interdiction. She rebels against John's attempts to control her by instituting her own system of self-discipline: writing. Such a rebellion on her part, however, has marked consequences. She says, "I did write for a while in spite of them; but it does exhaust me a good deal having to be so sly about it, or else meet with heavy opposition. I sometimes fancy that in my condition if I had less opposition and more society and stimulus—but John says the very worst thing I can do is to think about my condition, and I confess it always makes me feel bad." When she writes at one point, "I would not say it to a living soul, of course, but this is dead paper and a great relief to my mind," the effects of the continual denial of her representations of reality start to become apparent. In writing only for "dead paper"—writing only to death—-her language use becomes less governed by existence in the world outside her. She ceases to function as a "speaking-subject" in the world. Continually denied recognition as a subject, treated as a nonspeaker, as one whose representations are invalid (because they are the representations of an invalid?), she comes to reject the effort of maintaining this "invalid" subjectivity: "I don't know why I should write this. I don't want to. I don't feel able. And I know John would think it absurd. But I must say what I feel and think in some way—it is such a relief! But the effort is getting to be greater than the relief."

The narrator's attempts to produce her reality, to realize her "representations," are failures and are eventually more frustrating than helpful. Gilman presents not just an image of a woman's "education in docility" but also the defeat of a woman writer, as Annette Kolodny and Paula Treichler have both pointed out. Kolodny describes the story as a woman's giving up writing in favor of reading "the symbolization of her own untenable and unacceptable reality" in the wallpaper ("A Map for Rereading"). Treichler argues that the diagnosis imposed by the physician-husband is not merely a representation of reality that contradicts the narrator's but a mechanism for controlling her ("Escaping the Sentence"). For Treichler, the wallpaper becomes a symbol of the escape from this control: women's writing "becomes possible only after women obtain the right to speak," but women's language remains merely "metaphorical and evocative."

But if we understand that writing here is a form of "control," too, then we see that although her system of self-discipline is radically at odds with that which her physician-husband would impose on her, eventually the distinction between the two becomes unclear. Studying the wallpaper, becoming one with its unknowable artistic principles, is another attempt at self-control but one that eventually becomes indistinguishable from the control of her husband: the wallpaper, like John, watches her.

"The Yellow Wallpaper" is a story about the loss of distinctions—between writing and reading, doctor and patient, medical and self-discipline, art and the body. Early in the story the narrator begins to reexperience her childhood sense that the furnishings of her room have a life of their own. Later, the wallpaper develops "absurd, unblinking eyes," and she eventually sees another woman in the wallpaper. In other words, the furnishings in her room seem to take on a threatening subjectivity of their own; they watch her, attempt to frighten her, and eventually cooperate with her. Throughout, she continues to assert her identity as a speaking subject, but that sense is continually denied by John, who does not listen to her or contradicts her when he does, and becomes more and more difficult to maintain. Coupled with her treatment as an object—something to be watched (by John and the wallpaper) but not listened to—we see that the distinction between subject and object becomes meaningless for her. She does not come to an awareness or rejection of her own "untenable and unacceptable reality"; rather, she becomes part of the world of objects. Her existence as a subject breaks down. Frustrated in her attempt to produce a readable text, she becomes one. Her body—through illness—becomes the outlet for her creativity. Denied the opportunity to make external representations, to write, she is forced to turn these creative impulses on herself. Gilman here illustrates how similar the two activities are.

Walter Benn Michaels, in his introduction to The Gold Standard and the Logic of Naturalism, argues that "The Yellow Wallpaper" is not about "a woman being driven crazy by Weir Mitchell's refusal to allow her to produce, [but] is about a woman driven crazy … by a commitment to production so complete that it requires her to begin by producing herself." He is right to claim that Gilman accepts the notion that the self must be produced, but he reads past the indications that "The Yellow Wallpaper" is the scene of a battle over who has the right to that production. The conflict in this story is between culturally accepted and culturally forbidden modes of self-production. The point of the woman's desire to write is not, as Michaels argues, to "produce evidence that [she is] still the same person"; it is, instead, to produce evidence that she is different. Gilman does not write "herself into her body" (emphasis added), as Alice James had done. She writes her way out of it. While all other distinctions in the story break down, one remains: the distinction between Gilman and her narrator, a distinction Michaels collapses. For even though it is an autobiographical story, Gilman maintains a sharp difference between herself, as writer-producer, and the woman in the story whose writing fails.

The problem in "The Yellow Wallpaper" is not production itself but who has control over production. The story becomes a rewriting of the Poe and Hawthorne stories ["Ligeia," "The Oval Portrait," "The Birthmark," "Rappaccini's Daughter," and The Blithedale Romance] at the point when the woman resists the male attempt to produce her as the perfect woman (in this case, the quiet and domestic wife). Unlike the cooperative Georgiana or the painter's wife in "The Oval Portrait," the narrator of "The Yellow Wallpaper" does not submit entirely to her husband's productive efforts. But the woman's resistance is not much more successful than the earlier women's cooperation had been; she does not end up dead, but she does end up mad.

The difficulty of "The Yellow Wallpaper" springs from uncertainty about the woman's writing and its relation to her illness. In the second half of the story, it is not clear who is writing or when. As the woman's position as a subject becomes more tenuous, it becomes impossible to sort out who or what is writing. Tenses shift back and forth between present and past ("I am securely fastened now" and "Now he's crying" to "said I" and "I kept on creeping"), the persona shifts from the woman in the room to the woman in the wallpaper, and the final scene—the tethered woman crawling around the edges of the room, creeping over her unconscious husband—leaves open the question of whether we are reading a madwoman's text, a sane woman's post facto description of madness, or an entirely impossible text, one that could never have been written. As a feminist critic I would like to read this story as that of a woman who has achieved "transcendent sanity" (Treichler, "Escaping the Sentence") because she has been able to imagine "mirages of health and freedom" (Gilbert and Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic), but I must eventually recognize that it is a tale of defeat. As Treichler herself has pointed out, the woman is tied up in the nursery and will undoubtedly be "sent to Weir Mitchell" when John regains consciousness.

A happy ending is not compatible with the tone or context of this story. In fact, "The Yellow Wallpaper" may go out of its way to avoid a happy ending, to emphasize its complete rejection of domesticity and the ideology of domestic fiction. Far from upholding motherhood as a means to power and self-expression, Gilman here represents motherhood and domesticity as the paths to confinement and madness, the death of self-expression. The narrative instability at the end of the story, then, is not the "communal voice" that Treichler finds but the voice of no one, the voice of one with no self. It is the voice of domesticity as Gilman imagines it: confined and mad. Denied the opportunity to make art, or the audience to appreciate it, the woman turns her artistic impulses to her own body, becoming thereby just another of the indecipherable furnishings of the "hereditary estate."

In The House of Mirth, the relationship between illness and art is central to an understanding of the character of Lily Bart and to Wharton's writing. Throughout the novel Lily is depicted and admired as an artistic object. Lily's beauty is central to her existence and is represented by Wharton as the result of painstaking production. Our first view of Lily is through Selden's eyes and shares his "confused sense that she must have cost a great deal to make." Lily's value is directly related to her beauty, to her status as a beautiful object. She has no money, no real family connections, and not much of a desirable character; she is a shallow gambler with no interest in high art, literature, or anything practical. Lily's one talent is as an artist of the body; as Dale Bauer argues in Feminist Dialogics, she "creates herself as a work of art." She is merely a beautiful commodity on the marriage market; she is in many ways the exemplar of Thorstein Veblen's women who are valuable to a future husband only to the extent of their ability to represent his wealth … Lily's value in the marriage market is doubly dependent on her beauty and her remaining virginal. The novel is, in one sense, a tale about the difficulties of "keeping up appearances"—both Lily's physical appearance and the appearance of innocence. Lily's life is devoted to the "art" of appearances. When that art fails—when she can no longer make art of her body by traditional methods (for example, clothes and makeup), Lily gradually becomes ill, losing sleep and abusing drugs. Her death, which leaves her body artistically arranged on her bed, is a culmination of her art of the body and her illness.

Wharton goes out of her way to emphasize that Lily is an artistic object, turning her at one point into "living art": at the Brys' tableaux vivants, Lily appears, unadorned, as a painting. She does not need decoration; she is decoration. It is significant that this moment when she is merely a silent painting is Lily's one moment of unmitigated triumph and the moment when it is she who becomes the producer. But, as Bauer points out, she only gains recognition "by inserting [herself] as the representation of another woman in a male-created text."

Susan Gubar argues that Lily's overdose is a logical extension of her objectification into art; once she had become an artistic object, there was little else to do but "kill herself into art" ("'The Blank Page' and the Issues of Female Creativity"). Gubar points to the fact that before taking the overdose, Lily examines her beautiful dresses and thinks about the tableaux vivants and then "thinks that there is 'some word she had found' to tell Selden.… This word is Lily's dead body; for she is now converted completely into a script for his edification, a text not unlike the letters and checks she has left behind to vindicate her life." Gubar argues further that this equation of body and word "illustrates the terrors not of the word made flesh but of the flesh made word." Like Alice James, Lily had to "get herself dead" in order to speak to Selden. But in contrast to Georgiana in "The Birthmark" and Beatrice Rappaccini, Lily is not made into an object by a man but turns herself into one. (Gubar's use of the passive disguises this.) She therefore takes control and refuses to let society define her; she does not merely leave her body as a text but also leaves those same checks that Gubar mentions and then looks past. She pays off Gus Trenor, making herself completely independent from his demands. Unfortunately, neither her checks nor her body are easily readable. Like the woman in the wallpaper, she finds that women's "language" remains, at least in part, incomprehensible. Lily's death exemplifies how "artistic discipline" can intensify into punishment, how the subversion of society's norms can be interpreted as collusion with them.

Lily fails at every artistic attempt that is not directed at her own body. Even when she is employed at the millinery shop in the "art … of [creating] ever varied settings for the face of fortunate womanhood," she is a complete failure, unable to make straight or even stitches. Lily's every attempt at communication is a failure, too. Finally, she even fails at her artistic specialty, herself: her looks begin to fail and she loses her reputation. Lily's only artistic success, the only effort that achieves the effect she desires—the compassion and love of Selden—is her death. She (as Wharton does in creating Lily's character) makes an art of death.

Gubar does not examine the artistry involved in Lily's death scene. Lily does not merely become "a word"; she also becomes, as she had done in the tableaux vivants, a painting. In Idols of Perversity, Bram Dijkstra shows that one of the most popular genres of turn-of-the-century painting was the "death" or "sleep" painting; Shakespeare's Ophelia and Tennyson's Lady of Shalott and Elaine were among the most popular subjects for the visual arts, as were anonymous dead women. These paintings were an extension of the drowned women paintings and sculptures described by Joy Kasson and Olive Anderson and, as Dijkstra maintains, exhibited "the erotic ambiguity of the Victorian ideal of passive womanhood—the dead woman—indicating how easily a painterly homage to feminine self-sacrifice could shift toward a necrophiliac preoccupation with the erotic potential of woman when in a state of virtually guaranteed passivity."

Many of these paintings, especially those depicting Albine (the heroine who dies at the end of Emile Zola's The Sin of Father Mouret [1875]), surround the dead woman with flowers; the dead woman is "nature's flower" who will "die like a flower among the flowers" (Dijkstra, Idols of Perversity). Lily, as her name indicates, is also a flower, and like the women in Romaine Brooks's Le Trajet or Dead Woman (ca. 1911), Hermann Moest's The Fate of Beauty (1898), Paul-Albert Besnard's The Dead Woman (1880s), John Collier's The Death of Albine (ca. 1895), Lucy Hartmann's Albine (ca. 1899), Frances MacDonald's The Sleeping Princess (1897), Madeline Lemaire's Sleep (1890), and Sarah Bernhardt's self-portrait, Sarah in Her Coffin (ca. 1870s), Lily, too, becomes a dead but aesthetic object for a male viewer. It is only at her death, when she has literally embodied one of these paintings—her body aesthetically arranged on the bed, in stark contrast with her dingy surroundings—that Selden, like the Victorian male Dijkstra describes, is able to love her.

It seems remarkable that many of these paintings, like The House of Mirth, were created by women artists. Even on the stage, the undisputed queen of the theater, Sarah Bernhardt, specialized in death and madness scenes; her La Dame aux camélias set the worldwide standard for beauty and grace. Dijkstra argues that these women artists participated in and refined a male-defined genre. But if we examine their works in the context of the stresses involved in being a woman artist, these works appear not so much to conform to the male-defined genre as to turn that genre to their own psychic needs. If these women produced artistic objects to satisfy the demands of patriarchal disciplinary power, then those productions could take their places in that power structure; the women would therefore not have to turn themselves into artistic objects. "Killing the invalid," then, could become an activity quite similar to the one described by Virginia Woolf as "killing the angel in the house": an act of violence necessary to free the female artist from a dangerous and debilitating system of power ("Professions for Women," in Collected Essays). That dead invalid would then shield the woman artist from having to embody cultural norms.

Elaine Showalter argues in "The Death of the Lady (Novelist)" that this kind of exorcism of the "Perfect Lady" in The House of Mirth allowed Edith Wharton to become a novelist:

In choosing to have Lily die, Wharton was judging and rejecting the infantile aspects of her own self, the part that lacked confidence as a working writer, that longed for the escapism of the lady's world and feared the sexual consequences of creating rather than becoming art.… If Lily Bart, unable to change, gives way to the presence of a new generation of women, Edith Wharton survives the crisis of maturation at the turn of the century and becomes one of our American precursors of a literary history of female mastery and growth.

Lily's death thus serves two purposes: it shows the horror of the body's objectification, the dangers for women of the self-discipline of body-art, and it also provides Wharton with the same kind of surrogate ill woman that Gilman found in "The Yellow Wallpaper." For in creating ill flesh in words, Wharton was able to will herself not to create illness in herself.

Like Wharton, Charlotte Perkins Gilman managed to cure herself through her representation, her "story" of a breakdown. Just as The House of Mirth is a narrative of the world Edith Wharton had experienced when she was younger, so, too, is "The Yellow Wallpaper" a representation of much of what Gilman herself experienced. But while the woman in her story does not benefit from her writing, Gilman's writing proved to be restorative. In writing out an alternative narrative, in writing a breakdown rather than continuing to have one, Gilman not only made the patriarchal disciplinary system and woman's place in it visible, but she found that the writing could take her place. In creating a narrative of her hysterical condition, she no longer had to embody illness directly but could represent it in her text. Her story and her subsequent writings were published and allowed her a revision of her metaphorical place. She became a social worker, feminist crusader, and writer—a visible subject in the outer world, with new concrete possibilities open to her.

The "writing cure" as it can be seen in Gilman's and Wharton's work is not identical to turn-of-the-century mind cure or New Thought. Neither woman could "let go" and "surrender" her individual will to the "All-Supply," as most curists advocated. But in another sense, their writing does conform to the strain of New Thought and mind cure that developed in tandem with economic individualism. Success authors like Orison Swett Marden linked health, wealth, and character; health and wealth were signs of moral strength, sickness and poverty of moral failure (see Gail Parker, Mind Cure in New England). Writing became for Gilman and Wharton a self-reliant, active, and determined attempt to defeat the will to illness; they regarded illness as weakness and a moral failure (as Wharton's attitude toward her husband's illness reveals …), to which neither writer would succumb.

While The House of Mirth and "The Yellow Wallpaper" may have proven curative for their writers, they have nonetheless left an interesting dilemma for the feminist critic. These two fictions surely must be among the unhappiest of the fictions of feminine defeat in American literature. In both, the women's repeated mistakes and bad judgments, or at least their acquiescence in others' bad judgments, becomes, to the modern feminist reader, almost embarrassing. In both, the lack of viable alternatives is frustrating.

As a result of our desire to read past this defeat, contemporary feminist critics often attempt to "recover" a happy version of these unhappy endings. We either rewrite the endings—Lily's suicide becomes a release into freedom from social strictures, or the narrator's madness at the end of "The Yellow Wallpaper" becomes a burst into female creativity—or we turn, as I have done, to biography to deal with these two works. Rewriting the endings, it seems to me, is to argue that women's only option is to be completely outside the system, that our only escape is madness and death. This seems both false to our own experience and to refuse the genuine social criticism in the novel; to rewrite these endings as somehow "happy" is to deny that the society should be changed.

Biography, then, remains the only way to create happy endings for these two fictions. No one discusses "The Yellow Wallpaper" without mentioning Gilman's own triumph over Mitchell's rest cure; very few feminist readers look at The House of Mirth without some mention of Wharton's emergence as an important writer. And yet these fictions became central in the "feminist canon" long before others that feature victorious feminine characters. Nineteenth-century novels that feature women who not only avoid the invalid stereotype but become physicians have only come back into print in the last few years; New American Library brought out an edition of Sarah Orne Jewett's Country Doctor in 1986, and Elizabeth Stuart Phelps's Doctor Zay was reprinted by the Feminist Press in 1987. Christine—an openly feminist novel with a triumphant heroine—is not only out of print but still very difficult to find. "The Yellow Wallpaper," on the other hand, was one of the very first volumes published by the Feminist Press in 1973, and Wharton's The House of Mirth, of course, has never gone out of print. It is important to our understanding of both the "writing cure" and feminist criticism to evaluate why this has come about.

One important factor in understanding this phenomenon lies in the relation of these texts to women's writing, which, as Helen Papashvily (and others) would have it, is typified by happy endings (the title of her book on the subject is All the Happy Endings). "The Yellow Wallpaper" and The House of Mirth both belong much more clearly to the mainstream, canonical tradition in American literature in style, form, and substance than they do to domestic (or women's) fiction. In other words, they were read by feminist critics at least in part because they were not seen as "feminine" texts. They could be read in the same way and on the same critical ground as "masculine" fiction; they were texts of which feminist critics could be proud because they resisted the "sentimentality" of the happy ending. Gilman and Wharton did in fact, to an extent, reject or revise the basic tenets of domestic fiction. Gilman explicitly rejected the notion that motherhood and managing a household offered women a path to power; like many twentieth-century feminists, she saw the home as a prison for women (as the imagery in "The Yellow Wallpaper" so clearly suggests). Despite her rejection of much of their ideology, Gilman nevertheless has affinities with the previous generation of women writers. Like them, she centers her fiction on female characters, and like them, her work is deeply distrustful of men while it focuses on a community of women. "The Yellow Wallpaper" is atypical of much of her work because it concentrates so exclusively on one woman, but it does so only to reveal how dangerous the lack of "society and stimulus" can be. In Wharton's case, the situation is reversed: she has affinities with domestic ideology—as Elaine Showalter has argued, the warm kitchen scene at Nettie Struther's is symbolic of the feminine community and warmth that Lily has missed and that might have saved her—but she attempts to break with the previous generation of women writers when it comes to structure, style, and narrative outcome. At every point, The House of Mirth seems like a novel determined to rebut nineteenth-century women's fictions in which the heroine ends up happy after long years of suffering. In The House of Mirth, mistakes only lead to further mistakes, suffering to more suffering.

In contrast to the traditional plot of women's fiction, neither "The Yellow Wallpaper" nor The House of Mirth offers the reader the satisfaction of the heroine's triumph over adverse circumstances. Gilman and Wharton are, in fact, relentless about creating fictional worlds in which their heroines have very few options; the narrator of "The Yellow Wallpaper" could, of course, have rebelled against John, but she would only have been "sent to Weir Mitchell" later. Lily could have saved herself by sacrificing Bertha Dorset, or by blackmailing her, but would then have only become a part of the corrupt society Wharton condemns. Both writers therefore reject domestic ideology precisely at the point of suggesting that a happy ending is possible within the structure of existing society. For Gilman, it is the "happy ending" of domestic fiction—wife- and motherhood—that causes the problem in the first place. Wharton's attitude is more complex. In one sense, marriage is the one possibility for Lily's survival and happiness; in another, it is the degradation of husband hunting that is the problem in the first place. Wharton offers the scene of Nettie Struther's happy ending as a foil to Lily's unhappy one but assures the reader that such an ending is impossible for Lily within the world of New York high society. Gilman and Wharton use their heroines as proof that women's lives needed to be changed, that it was the social structure that was really sick.

In both fictions, the woman's defeat is closely linked to her social class. Just as the options that are open to Nettie Struther, the working-class woman, are closed to Lily Bart, so, too, are the chances for "congenial work" closed to the narrator of "The Yellow Wallpaper," a woman who has a nurse, a housekeeper, and a wealthy husband. Both fictions subscribe to the Social Darwinist/Spencerian concept of the world outlined by Gilman in Women and Economics (1899): "When man began to feed and defend woman, she ceased proportionately to feed and defend herself. When he stood between her and her physical environment, she ceased proportionately to feel the influence of that environment and respond to it." Gilman theorizes that women's social problems and their unequal standing in the culture are a result of generations of selective breeding in which woman's only value is "sex-attraction" and of being shut out of productive labor. "To be surrounded by beautiful things has much influence upon the human creature: to make beautiful things has more.… What we do modifies us more than what is done to us. The freedom of expression has been more restricted in women than the freedom of impression, if that be possible."

Gilman argues that the only hope for women and the whole human race lies in women becoming workers, earning their keep, and becoming producers instead of consumers because "to do and to make not only gives deep pleasure, but is indispensable to healthy growth.… To carve in wood, to hammer brass, to do 'art dressmaking,' to raise mushrooms in the cellar … is a most healthy state." The hope of the race, she argues, lies with the "increasing army of women wage-earners, who are changing the face of the world by their steady advance toward economic independence." The only women who are fit to face motherhood without fear of the "gates of death," she continues, are the "savage woman, the peasant woman, the working-woman everywhere who is not overworked" who is allowed to "mingle in the natural industries of a human creature."

Wharton, too, was influenced by Social Darwinist thought and the new medical theories of inheritance and environmental influence (as the title of one of her story collections—The Descent of Man and Other Stories—attests). Like Gilman's Women and Economics, The House of Mirth maintains that women who have been bred for leisure are not fit for a life of self-sufficiency. Wharton seems to share Gilman's view that there is little hope for a change in this situation, and both writers idealize the "innate" strength of the working class. Nettie Struther is able to overcome tuberculosis, poverty, and the stigma of single-motherhood to find health, happiness, and a good marriage. Lily suffers much less adversity, yet it proves fatal. Wharton goes to great lengths to show that this failure is not Lily's fault but the fault of her upbringing, the weakness she inherits from both her parents, and the society in which she lives; the result is a Social Darwinist argument of survival of the fittest. Lily (and her entire class) proves as fragile as the flower whose name she bears.

The female protagonists of these fictions do not, however, remain blameless; Social Darwinism is not the only important and popular cultural theory to find its way into Gilman's and Wharton's work. In the age of self-help, mind cure, and New Thought, Lily and the narrator of "The Yellow Wallpaper" must necessarily be examined not just as helpless pawns in a capitalist, patriarchal, evolutionary system but as autonomous creatures in control of their own destinies. Accusation is implicit in Gilman's story of the defeat of the woman writer. When the narrator complains that writing "does exhaust me a great deal," one can almost hear Orison Swett Marden condemning the weakness that would give in to a little exhaustion; after all, Gilman herself managed to write despite such adverse circumstances.

Throughout The House of Mirth is the dream of a better society, Selden's "republic of the spirit," which sounds remarkably like a New Thought paradise. New Thought philosophy advocated a notion of success in which virtue triumphs over materialism. Selden, in describing his "republic" to Lily, defines it in terms of "success": "-'My idea of success,' he said, 'is personal freedom.… [Freedom] from everything—from money, from poverty, from ease and anxiety, from all material accidents.… That's what I call success.… It is a country one has to find one's way to one's self." Selden's vision is comparable to Orison Swett Marden's: "Happiness today, now, is our duty.… How contemptible mere money-wealth looks in comparison with a serene life, with a life which dwells in the ocean of truth, beneath the waves, beyond the reach of the tempests in eternal calm" (The Young Man Entering Business [1903], quoted in Gail Parker, Mind Cure in New England). While many modern critics dismiss Selden's "republic of the spirit" as hypocritical or faddist and discredit his vision of a better world, it nevertheless seems to be the sort of world Wharton advocates as a remedy to the diseased New York society that destroys Lily, even if Selden proves a poor citizen of it. The kind of methodical character building urged by New Thought writers is the only remedy possible for Lily's degrading attempt to acquire money through marriage. Only in a world that valued people for what they were, rather than what they appeared to be or owned, could Lily have developed less materialistic desires.

"The Yellow Wallpaper" and The House of Mirth both illustrate that it is the culture that is more diseased than the woman or, at least, that it is the diseased culture that causes her illness or death. In each novel, nevertheless, the woman is condemned for lacking the strength or fortitude to overcome society's ills. Had the narrator of "The Yellow Wallpaper" continued to write despite her fatigue, she might have recovered, like Gilman herself; had Lily Bart not given in to the physical ease and pleasure seeking she had been accustomed to, she might have stayed alive or married Selden.

One does not undertake a biographical reading intending to undermine the fiction, of course. Feminist criticism that focuses on the biography of Charlotte Perkins Gilman and Edith Wharton (as I and many others have done) provides a "recovery" of the happy ending by redescribing the context in which to read the fiction. Such criticism sets out what Michel Foucault calls an "author-function," that is, a way to classify the text, define it, compare it with some texts, and contrast it to others. It allows us to "reveal" or "characterize" the text's "mode of being" ("What Is an Author?"). We can then read "The Yellow Wallpaper" in the context of Herland, Women and Economics, and Gilman's autobiography to find a feminist parable. And we can read Lily Bart's failure in the context of Wharton's own escape from the strictures of New York's "polite" society and in the context of Custom of the Country and Age of Innocence to define it as a novel of brilliant social criticism. As Annette Kolodny has pointed out, such criticism allows us to appreciate the individual text because we know "the whole in which it was embedded" ("Reply to Commentaries"). We can therefore reexamine the figure of the invalid woman against a different ground. Such criticism allows us to read the narrative of feminine defeat within the context of the woman writer's victory and to derive our satisfaction from the fact that Gilman and Wharton managed to avoid the fates that they so eloquently described. But before I close on this happy note, I want to examine the impulse the ideology that drives this kind of criticism: why do we continue to read and praise novels of feminine defeat only to reinscribe them in biographical stories with happy endings?

Other feminist critics have tried to answer this question, but so far, none have really resolved the conflict between feminist ideology and masculine aesthetics. One answer to this question is suggested by Myra Jehlen in one of the more interesting feminist works on narrative endings, "Archimedes and the Paradox of Feminist Criticism." Jehlen suggests that the "feminine success story" of domestic fiction may be good ideology but remains bad writing; she suggests that the successful female character makes for neither good fiction nor, she implies, a good subject for feminist criticism. In contrast, she suggests that the novel of feminine defeat (best exemplified by Samuel Richardson's Clarissa), while worse ideologically (from a feminist standpoint), is more interesting as fiction.

When the conflict Jehlen foregrounds—that between aesthetics and ideological judgments—is taken up in traditional literary criticism, it becomes an unproblematic denial of feminist ideology's literary value. In Beneath the American Renaissance, the only criticism to deal at any length with Bullard's Christine, David Reynolds argues that Christine manages to be a wonderful novel despite its focus on a mid-nineteenth-century feminist spokeswoman. He claims:

The real success of Christine … lies not in its advocacy of women's rights or its portrayal of women's wrongs but in its power as a compelling, taut novel written by a progressive American woman.… Here we come upon a central paradox of American women's fiction, indeed of women's literature in general: that is, it most often succeeds artistically when it leaves behind feminist politics. In this sense, it becomes women's literature when it refuses to be women's propaganda and asserts its power as an expression of universal themes, (emphasis in original)

It is doubtful that Jehlen would agree with Reynolds in his assessment of the "artistic success" of women's literature or in his assertion that great literature discusses "universal themes," thus flattening all questions of gender. But she does conclude that feminist criticism, if it is to find a way to reconcile ideological analysis and artistic analysis, must find a way to deal with this paradox. She suggests that we resolve this paradox through a reevaluation of the epistemology that upholds our aesthetic judgments.

Gilbert and Gubar suggest a different possibility for resolution; in their response to Frank Lentricchia's attack on their work, "The Man on the Dump versus the United Dames of America," they claim that they have "long believed that it is necessary to disentangle political ideology from aesthetic evaluation." Despite a fundamental disagreement on most issues, then, Jehlen and Gilbert and Gubar agree that it is somehow possible to separate ideological and aesthetic judgments. But such a separation is impossible, as the "happy endings" of the critical evaluations of "The Yellow Wallpaper" and The House of Mirth show.

Feminist critics who read stories of feminine defeat but embed them in the "whole" that includes the woman writer's dramatic victory over illness and society's structures are, it seems to me, trying to find a way to sidestep the contradiction in their ideological and aesthetic evaluations. This paradox is configured by traditional (male) standards of literary value on one side (what counts as "good fiction") and by New Thought standards of success on the other (what counts as a "happy ending" for the authors). It is an attempt to find a feminist-ideological justification for an aesthetic evaluation based on traditional literary critical standards, without recognizing that it is a capitalist, patriarchal ideology of self-discipline that informs that "feminist" evaluation in the first place. I do not mean to suggest that the "endings" would have been happier for Wharton and Gilman had they, like their heroines, succumbed to the forces of their society, but we should recognize that the move on the part of feminist critics to "recover" happy endings for these fictions does exactly what the fictions themselves argue against: it provides an individual solution to the problem of societal "disease" without fundamentally challenging the structure or ideology of that society. Like most feminist fictions, "The Yellow Wallpaper" and The House of Mirth explicitly challenge societal norms and the power of the individual to overcome them. To then celebrate the individual writer's triumph over those norms is to disavow the social criticism in the fiction. The same feminist critics who value fiction like Wharton's and Gilman's because it, like masculine realist fiction, resists the "happy ending" of domestic novels nevertheless reenact that happy ending in their criticism by subscribing to a theory of individual power.

It would be nice if I could offer a "happy ending," an easy resolution to this dilemma, at this point. But I find that whatever solution I offer has a new set of problems, creates a new kind of unhappy ending of its own.

If we continue to read these unhappy fictions and resist the impulse to add on our critical happy endings, we create two new problems. First, we are left with only a negative feminism, an argument about what the world should not be like, not an argument for what changes we might make. But it also leaves that aesthetic of defeated women in place; the sense that only dead or mad women are beautiful remains unquestioned. If we are to find any way to reconcile ideology and aesthetics, we cannot continue to read merely the same texts.

Of course, we could also revise our aesthetic evaluations entirely and recuperate the lost sentimental tradition; we can urge publishers to bring back into print the sentimental texts we have lost. This is, of course, a project already underway with Rutgers University Press's American Women Writers Series, with the Feminist Press, and with New American Library's Plume Women Writers Series, among others. The problem with this—aside from the need to completely reeducate our aesthetic sensibilities—is that what counts as a "happy ending" for many sentimental fictions—the woman's eventual marriage and her coming into wealth is not really what we would advocate today as a happy ending. For better or for worse, New Thought philosophy is deeply embedded in the American success ethic today, perhaps especially among feminist scholars who had to will their way through graduate school and into the profession. If one listens to contemporary conversations with an ear for New Thought phrasing, one hears the same self-reliance, determination, willpower, and "stick-to-itiveness" that Gilman urged in the pages of Success. Nineteenth-century sentimental fiction advocates a completely different ethic of "success" and has a different notion of what counts as a happy ending. As professional women, feminist critics may be uncomfortable with the wholesale move into a sentimental canon that holds marriage out as the only "happy ending."

We could therefore turn to "New Woman" fictions, where heroines manage to defy social convention, become successful professionals, and sometimes even couple that professional success with romantic success. These novels—like Dr. Zay, Country Doctor, and Christine—give us an individual who fundamentally changes society: a woman whose success is predicated on a change in the world and who uses her success to help other women. This "solution," though, continues to uphold individualistic, New Thought, capitalist notions of success, at least to a certain extent, while simultaneously forcing us to reevaluate aesthetic judgments. It would not be an easy or trouble-free solution.

Perhaps the best solution is to try to do some of all of the things suggested here: read unhappy endings as social criticism, and read the different kinds of happy endings with a critical eye. We can also search for texts that resist the dichotomy happy/unhappy at all; texts like Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God can be categorized as neither happy nor unhappy. But we need to foreground the relation between ideology and aesthetics as well as the questions of the uses of aesthetics and of whether one ever "escapes" ideology. We should, I think, work to keep Jehlen's paradox problematized.