SOURCE: Golden, Catherine. “‘Overwriting’ the Rest Cure: Charlotte Perkins Gilman's Literary Escape from S. Weir Mitchell's Fictionalization of Women.” In Critical Essays on Charlotte Perkins Gilman, edited by Joanne B. Karpinski, pp. 144-58. New York: G. K. Hall & Co., 1992.

[In the following essay, Golden discusses the writings of novelist and doctor S. Weir Mitchell, on whom the doctor in “The Yellow Wallpaper” is based. Golden demonstrates the ways in which “The Yellow Wallpaper” provides a feminist counter-discourse to nineteenth-century patriarchal medical discourse.]

In 1887 S. Weir Mitchell treated Charlotte Perkins Gilman (then Stetson)¹ for a nervous breakdown following a postpartum depression and forbade her to write.² A specialist in women's nervous disorders, Mitchell attended well-known male and female literary figures. George Meredith and Walt Whitman apparently experienced no ill effects from his prescriptions; Jane Addams, Edith Wharton, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, and Virginia Woolf suffered from his Rest Cure treatment.³ After nearly losing her sanity by rigidly following his parting advice “never [to] touch pen, brush or pencil as long as you live” (Living, 96), Gilman defied Mitchell and transformed him into a minor but memorable character in her fiction. In “The Yellow Wallpaper” the nameless narrator, undergoing a three-month Rest Cure for a postpartum depression, protests that her physician/husband John “says if I don't pick up faster he shall send me to Weir Mitchell in the fall.”⁴ Although Gilman does not discuss her physician in detail in her story, she does name him as well as indict him in this one salient reference, which continues: “But I don't want to go there at all. I had a friend who was in his hands once, and she says he is just like John and my brother, only more so!” (19).

Gilman's introduction of her doctor into a first-person narrative gains interest and complexity when we consider that this foremost nineteenth-century American neurologist had a second career as a novelist. In addition to medical books and essays on the nervous system, mental fatigue, and convalescence, he published several collections of short stories, three volumes of poetry, and nineteen novels between 1884 and 1913.⁵ Although virtually unknown today, Mitchell was, in fact, one of the most popular turn-of-the-century American writers; critics compared Mitchell's Hugh Wynne (1896) to Thackeray's Henry Esmond (1852).⁶ Many of his literary efforts incorporated psychiatric themes and doctor-patient relationships informed by his own practice and that of his affluent physician father, John Kearsley Mitchell.

Supporters of Mitchell's fiction such as David Rein and Ernest Earnest argue that Mitchell “deserves to be restored to the canon of American literature” (Earnest, 235).⁷ Rein praises Mitchell as an author, for “in his fictional studies of nervous disorders he stood alone. He was the first novelist in American literature to present such clinically accurate portraits of mentally ill characters. No one else had done it, except Oliver Wendell Holmes. But even Holmes's work lacks much of the merit of Mitchell's” (Rein, 182-83). However, even those who commend Mitchell's fictional studies modeled after his own patients are quick to raise his shortcomings as a novelist. Mitchell's fiction disappoints because it often fails to bring a character vividly to life, to explore the causes of the protagonists' nervous breakdowns, or to show their progressive deterioration into hysteria, as Rein and Jeffrey Berman have noted.⁸ Moreover, as a writer, Mitchell sacrifices the plotline of his novels to feature conversations his characters have with one another; as a result, his style is conversational at best.

Mitchell never wrote about Gilman in his fiction exploring abnormal psychology or in his psychiatric books detailing the Weir Mitchell Rest Cure. Nonetheless, his almost forgotten fiction offers insight into why Gilman decided to write “The Yellow Wallpaper”; in her words, “to reach Dr. S. Weir Mitchell, and convince him of the error of his ways” (Living, 121). A comparison of the fictional female characters in S. Weir Mitchell's late nineteenth-century novels and Gilman's own protagonist in “The Yellow Wallpaper” (1892) suggests that through his Rest Cure treatment Mitchell tried to reform his patient Charlotte Perkins Gilman along the lines of his fictional female protagonists, many of whom followed a version of his Rest Cure. Mitchell's Characteristics (1891), written shortly after Gilman's treatment in Mitchell's sanitarium, demonstrates the physician/author's patriarchal portrayal of the (male) doctor-(female) patient relationship that Gilman revised in “The Yellow Wallpaper” (1892). She defied her doctor in 1890 not only by writing “The Yellow Wallpaper” but also, more specifically, by creating a protagonist who also writes. Her creative life and her fiction reveal that she ultimately “overwrote” Mitchell's efforts to make her more like the ideal female patients predominant in his affluent medical practice and his fiction.

Gilman was twenty-six years old when she traveled to Philadelphia to enter the sanitarium of Dr. S. Weir Mitchell. Like Sigmund Freud, Mitchell was trained as a neurologist, but he earned special recognition as a nerve specialist for women. Only by the end of the century did the medical profession, influenced by the work of Freud, begin to distinguish between diseases of the mind, to be treated by psychiatrists, and diseases of the brain, to be treated by neurologists. Neurology in the mid-to-late nineteenth century explored the relationship between psychology and physiology. Nerves were considered the link between the mind and the body, and the symptoms of mental exhaustion and depression were thought to be somatic in origin. Aiming to heal the mind by healing the body, Mitchell's Rest Cure attended to the physical symptoms of depression. Although Mitchell is credited with the Rest Cure, he developed it from a number of accepted medical practices. His Rest Cure earned him international acclaim (his work was translated into four languages before his death in 1914). In fact, Freud favorably reviewed Mitchell's first book, Fat and Blood (1877), approved of his Rest Cure, and even adapted and used it for a period of time.⁹

Mitchell diagnosed Gilman's condition as “nervous prostration” or “neurasthenia,” a breakdown of the nervous system, and prescribed his Rest Cure. Following the birth of her daughter, she had become depressed, spiritless, weak, and hysterical. This psychiatric condition was in no way unique to Gilman or to the female population; men also suffered from it, as had Mitchell himself.¹⁰ Because of the strains on the Victorian woman imposed by the rigid ideals of femininity, debilitating nervous disorders were more common among upper-and middle-class women than men. The causes of neurasthenia were thought to be gender-specific: while men succumbed from overwork, women suffered from too much social activity, sustained or severe domestic trials (e.g., nursing a sick family member), and overexertion brought on by pursuing higher education.

In treating his patients Mitchell demanded obedience and deliberately assumed a detached, stern manner that he believed helpful, especially for patients who had been pampered and indulged by well-intentioned relatives. He was patronizing to women, a trend that characterizes his extensive writings about the Rest Cure, mental fatigue, and convalescence. For instance, in Doctor and Patient, Mitchell writes that “there are many kinds of fool, from the mindless fool to the fiend-fool, but for the most entire capacity to make a household wretched there is no more complete human receipt than a silly woman who is to a high degree nervous and feeble, and who craves pity and likes power”;¹¹ in fact, he considered Gilman's involvement in the history of her own case “proved self-conceit” (Living, 95). Nonetheless, Mitchell was more liberal than many male physicians of his time. He believed in the legitimacy of and the suffering caused by neurasthenia, validating women's complaints. He openly scorned the abuse of ovariotomies and other forms of commonly prescribed radical gynecological surgery. Mitchell also approved of physical exercise as well as higher education for women in the areas of child care and home management in order to fit women for the domestic sphere.¹²

Although Mitchell's Rest Cure was in accordance with the most advanced neurological thinking of his day, in modern eyes it can be read as an attempt to reorient women to the domestic sphere (and away from influences of their changing world) so that they could fulfill their most important role in society: to bear and rear children. The covert aim of severely enforcing the treatment was so that the patient would feel “surfeited with [rest] and [would] welcome a firm order to do the things she once felt she could not do.”¹³ Typically lasting six to eight weeks, the Rest Cure focused on nutrition and revitalization of the body. It included five components: total, enforced, extended bed rest (the patient was forbidden to sew, converse, move herself in and out of bed, read, write, and, in more extreme cases, even to feed herself); seclusion from family and familiar surroundings (to remove the patient from the pampering of well-meaning relatives would sever hurtful old habits); a carefully controlled diet (overfeeding, the key ingredient being milk and cream to create new energy by increasing body volume); massage; and electricity (the latter two components were introduced to prevent muscular atrophy).¹⁴

The Rest Cure was not without merits; similar to the spa water cures in fashion in nineteenth-century Europe and America, the Rest Cure removed the individual from the tensions of his or her world and offered a sanctuary for rest. Hundreds of women traveled to Mitchell's sanitarium from around the world to seek his Rest Cure. Many felt relieved that their complaints had been both recognized and treated, and they left satisfied. Nonetheless, to many women, including Gilman, Mitchell's Rest Cure was punitive. Mitchell admitted that his methods of treating women for neurasthenia were harsh: “Rest can be made to help. Rest can also hurt.”¹⁵ Despite this admission of what many women feared about his Rest Cure, Mitchell consistently defended his methods as necessary to cure them, allowing them to resume their traditional domestic roles.

Threatened by the direction of the “new woman” emerging in the late nineteenth century, Mitchell clung to the traditional view of the dutiful, protected woman and immortalized her in his fiction. Unlike the women in Gilman's stories, passive heroines abound in Mitchell's writings. Some female characters demonstrate intellectual vigor, such as Alice Leigh in Characteristics, or exert strong will, such as Serena Vernon in A Comedy of Conscience (1900). Both ultimately put aside their independent notions and follow the advice of strong male characters, taking the opposite course from that of Gilman's protagonists.

At least in the novel's opening, A Comedy of Conscience reveals a portrait of a liberated woman. A spinster by choice, Serena is described as a healthy, attractive, strong-willed, and “intelligent, but not intellectual”¹⁶ woman who often asks for but seldom takes advice. Similar to the nameless protagonist in “The Yellow Wallpaper,” Serena keeps a diary throughout the novel and has a suitor named John (a common name in Mitchell's fiction).¹⁷ While the nameless protagonist in “The Yellow Wallpaper” defies her husband/physician John, Serena Vernon increasingly relies on her male cousin John Winterbourne, her rejected suitor who remains devoted to her. Serena becomes more dependent upon others for advice after she is robbed—a criminal steals her wallet on the trolley-car (and inadvertently drops a stolen diamond ring into her handbag); although Mitchell does not overtly discuss the robbery as a cause for her change, this event seemingly accounts for Serena's dramatic transformation from self-sufficiency to dependency on the advice of male figures, namely the trusted Doctor Saffron, her rector, and John. Although Serena asks advice of her “nearest female friend” (8) Mrs. Clare regarding what to do with the “stolen” diamond ring and even claims “A woman will see this miserable business from my side” (41), she discounts Mrs. Clare's advice; she listens instead to John, whose hand in marriage she accepts at the very end of the novel (despite her strong convictions not to marry him at the beginning). At this point, Serena's John declares her “nervous” (although we were initially assured that she was rarely ill) and prescribes rest: “Go to bed, dear” (125). When she resists, he calls her a “Dear child!” (127), paternalistic language reminiscent of the nameless protagonist's husband John in “The Yellow Wallpaper.”

In an earlier novel, Roland Blake (1886), the most interesting character is not the hero Roland, an intelligence officer in the Union army, but a more minor character, Octopia Darnell, a patient similar to those Mitchell describes again and again in Doctor and Patient and Fat and Blood.¹⁸ Octopia—who shuns the light, constantly complains, and prefers to recline rather than stand—is thin and lacks blood. By giving Octopia an attenuated frame and impoverished blood, Mitchell embodies in his fictional patient two of the outstanding characteristics of the class of nervous women for whom he devised and prescribed his Rest Cure.¹⁹ At the onset of the novel, Octopia is a “settled inmate”²⁰ in the home of a distant relative, the elderly Mrs. Wynne. The cause of her physical condition, which we are told has no physiological origin, remains unclear until the second third of the novel. Nursing Mrs. Wynne's son, Arthur, during the last week of his life, Octopia witnesses his suicide and immediately proclaims herself ill. She gains power over Mrs. Wynne by declaring that her illness results from the strain of attending Arthur Wynne at his deathbed and by threatening to reveal Arthur's suicide (her recovery would thus diminish her claim on Mrs. Wynne).

Arthur Wynne's daughter, Olivia, comes to live in the home of her paternal grandmother, in which her distant invalid cousin Octopia has earned a permanent residence. With Olivia's arrival, the hysterical Octopia, whom Mitchell describes as “too wicked to die” (62), becomes a scheming chronic invalid who assigns herself to bed but continues to use her invalid status to plague her younger, passive cousin Olivia (e.g., “‘That was rough child. You forget I am an invalid’” [44]); she also tyrannizes Mrs. Wynne (e.g., “She [Octopia] is killing me by inches” [62]), who fears Octopia too much to remove her from her own home. Throughout the novel Olivia defers to her petulant, selfish, and cunning older cousin and becomes nursemaid both to her elderly grandmother and Octopia.

Mitchell does not glorify Octopia's well-meaning “victim” (97) but uses Olivia to make a point in fiction central to his medical writings on the Rest Cure: the overindulgence of well-intentioned relatives can only exacerbate the hysterical patient's condition and weaken the caretaker's health.²¹ In Olivia's case, “the exactions of her nervous, sickly cousin were surely sapping the wholesome life of the younger woman, and as surely lessening her power of self-restraint” (50). The forbearing Olivia, whose health deteriorates, admits that the capricious Octopia is only “half-sick”: “what must be the worst evil of half-sick people is the absence of regular work, of set duties—things that must be done” (376). However, Octopia, like many of the hysterically ill women Mitchell treated in his practice, does not know she is cruel to others: “she thought about herself and thought she didn't think about herself” (376). At the end of the novel, Mitchell rewards Olivia with marriage to Roland Blake and frees her from her nursemaid position. Olivia's departure, compounded by Mrs. Wynne's death, leads Octopia to wed Addenda Pennell, who caters to her whims as Olivia once did (e.g., “As for Pennell, he followed her [Octopia] about with a shawl and a scent-bottle, and says he has left the club and prefers the evening tranquility of domestic life” [379]). Mitchell is too much a realist to reform Octopia or to restore her health. Rather, this final twist shows how both sexes can succumb to the tyranny of the kind of “half-sick” patient possessing “the most entire capacity to make a household wretched” that Mitchell bemoans in Doctor and Patient and his other medical writings.

An apparent exception to the undermining of women's initiative by male (typically the physician's) authority occurs in Constance Trescot (1905). The eponymous heroine avenges the unjust death of her lawyer/husband George Trescot, who was shot by an emotionally unstable lawyer named Greyhurst under the pretense of a duel. Constance's power and authority, however, are only seen to serve male authority: these traits allow her to ruin her husband's murderer and to restore George Trescot's name and reputation. In other respects, Constance behaves like a typical Mitchell hysteric. Predictably, at the scene of the murder, Constance falls “insensible, convulsed, and quivering” at her husband's murderer's feet.²² Although a physically healthy woman at the opening of the novel, her passionate and obsessive love for her husband (which lies beyond the scope of Mitchell's inquiry) triggers an emotional collapse that leaves her physically wasted and eventually turns her into an anemic, “couch-loving invalid,”²³ rivaling Octopia Darnell. She devotes her life to ruining Greyhurst (who is not found guilty of murder) and uses her disabled status to rule her caretakers (e.g., “Constance relied on her misfortunes and her long illness to insure her an excess of sympathetic affection and unremitting service” [382]). In fact, just as Octopia made Olivia the victim of her demands in Roland Blake, Constance expects her well-meaning sister Susan to care for her tirelessly and, like Octopia, seems unaware of her own selfish nature.²⁴

Unlike Roland Blake and Constance Trescot, which offer portraits of tiresome invalids whose conditions worsen due to the indulgence of well-intentioned relatives, Characteristics and its sequel, Dr. North and His Friends (1900), epitomize the relationship between the (male) doctor and the ideal (female) patient that Mitchell prescribes and Gilman defies in the literary arena.²⁵ Two parts of the same story, these semi-autobiographical novels of conversation contain developed characters but do not have a sustained plot. Both works, narrated by Dr. Owen North, offer veiled self-portraits of Mitchell's own life; this is particularly true of Characteristics, which describes North's war injuries (Mitchell himself suffered greatly from the Civil War) and his ambivalence about pursuing medicine (Mitchell battled with his father, who initially objected to his career choice). Both novels feature female patients and offer but one strong female protagonist; Anne Vincent, the wife of Dr. North's best friend, Frederick Vincent, stands out as an intelligent and intrusive social matron, yet her strong role as a female adviser is undermined by Mitchell's frequent references to her unfortunate childless state. Both works offer Mitchell an occasion to present his belief that women can be good patients but not necessarily successful doctors.

In Fat and Blood, Mitchell states that women doctors “do not obtain the needed control over those of their own sex” (41). Mitchell questioned whether women doctors could exert the strict, objective manner necessary to manage the class of hysterical invalids that his fictional characters Octopia Darnell and Constance Trescot represent. Of course, in Fat and Blood he also admits that the male physician may also experience difficulty with this type of patient, and he does refer in passing to the abilities of women physicians as he qualifies: “it is in these cases that women who are in all other cases capable doctors fail” (41).²⁶ More than by the issue of competence, Mitchell was disturbed by the personal consequences for women entering medicine. Through the development of Alice Leigh in Characteristics, he presents his belief that a “capable” woman doctor would lose her essential femininity.

While the nameless protagonist in “The Yellow Wallpaper” defies her physician/husband John as the story continues, Alice Leigh enters the story as a woman with a mind and will of her own who sacrifices her convictions to follow the ideas of Dr. Owen North, who speaks Mitchell's views. Anne Vincent initially describes Alice as “a woman of unusual force of character … and intellect (for she is more than merely intelligent).”²⁷ Her quality of mind at the outset of the novel surpasses that of Serena Vernon's in A Comedy of Conscience. Mrs. Leigh, Alice's mother, turns to the much-respected Dr. North for advice when she discovers the extent of her daughter's ambitions: “Now she [Alice] proposes to … it is awful. She wants to study medicine, and, oh, you do not know Alice. She is so determined” (235). Owen North shares Mrs. Leigh's belief that a woman's entrance into the medical profession is “awful.” Though initially “determined” to pursue “something which offers an enlarging life” (249), Alice rather quickly abandons her plans to study and practice medicine right after Dr. North prescribes otherwise.

Although Owen does not attend Alice for a physical malady, her plan to be a doctor is referred to as a “disease” (235), and North counsels her as he would his female patients. When she first meets Owen North, the twenty-four-year-old Alice passionately ridicules her mother's suggestions that she sketch, play music, and sew. Spirited Alice argues for the need for “an enlarging life” (249), not for personal ambition but to benefit her society. Owen wins Alice's favor when he professes that “every human being is entitled to any career he or she may please to desire” (251); however, he soon reveals his prejudices. He tells Alice: “I said I did not believe it was best either for the sick or for society for women to be doctors; that, personally, women lose something of the natural charm of their sex in giving themselves either to this or to the other avocations until now in the sole possession of a man” (264). Immediately following their discussion, Alice becomes “quite tranquil” (275) and acquiesces to her mother's plan to leave behind her “‘hunger for imperative duties’” (235) and concentrate on marriage. Unfortunately, Mitchell neither explores nor explains the cause of Alice's sudden transformation, which seems implausible to the contemporary reader.

When Alice suddenly becomes ill (she starts looking pale), Mrs. Leigh attempts to engage Owen North as Alice's physician. He refuses because he has fallen in love with her. Proposing to Alice on the penultimate page of the novel, Owen secures the hand of the once willful Alice, who has become so rattled that she shreds her fan in a dozen bits as she accepts his proposal. Reduced to tears, she “sobbed like a child” and admits defeat: “Owen North, be very good to me. I meant to have done so much” (306). Rather than become a doctor, she marries the man who advises her not to develop her intellect. Mitchell concludes that, Alice, like her mother before her, is “cured” of her ambitions by marriage (235). At the end of the novel, Alice represents the ideals Mitchell prescribes to women through his medical writings and in his fiction. Nonetheless, the tearful state of the obedient Alice testifies to the trauma she experiences in putting aside her desire for a purposeful career only to gain usefulness through her physician/husband's life.

The narrator in “The Yellow Wallpaper” also sobs uncontrollably, although primarily at the beginning of the story.²⁸ Gilman revises the typical (male) doctor-(female) patient relationship by reversing the heroine's progress: Mitchell's strong-willed Alice is made passive, whereas Gilman's once submissive protagonist gains a forceful sense of self as she acts out of madness. Initially Gilman's nameless protagonist is as obedient to her physician/husband John as Mitchell's Alice Leigh sadly becomes toward her future husband/physician Owen North. Gilman's narrator defers to “Dear John” as well as to what “John says” (16) when he prescribes Mitchell's Rest Cure. Even though her room initially repulses her, she rests in the former nursery because John chose it for her. She stops her writing when she senses John's entry.

In her own text Gilman creates through the characterization of John a physician of “high standing” (10) who is also self-assured (“I am a doctor, dear, and I know” [23]) and thus similar to Owen North and to Mitchell himself. Moreover, John's authority is backed by the protagonist's well-respected physician/brother and by the threat of S. Weir Mitchell “only more so” (19). Unlike Mitchell's Alice, Gilman's heroine becomes aware of her submissiveness and defies her doctor's advice. Referring and deferring less to John as the story continues, the narrator pursues her ambitions: first, to find out the pattern of the wallpaper, then to tear it away, freeing the woman (and that part of herself) trapped behind the pattern. As she creeps along the walls of the sanitarium/prison, her actions move beyond the realm of sanity. Nonetheless, acting out of madness, she defies John and the male-dominated medical profession he represents. She creeps flamboyantly in the daytime as she desires. While Alice Leigh rips her fan to bits and acquiesces to her physician/husband, the nameless protagonist in “The Yellow Wallpaper” creeps over her physician/husband—a crucial reversal. Although her mad state allows her only a dubious victory,²⁹ in Gilman's story it is the male physician whose force is circumvented and who faints when confronted by the newly claimed autonomy of his female patient.

The behavior of Gilman's narrator also diverges from that of the female protagonists in Dr. North and His Friends, the sequel to Characteristics. This novel confirms the total submission of Alice Leigh, for whom even a dubious victory never comes. The narrator of Dr. North and His Friends refers to the once independent Alice Leigh as Mrs. North or “my wife.” Throughout this novel, Alice's voice is silenced as a result of her constant deference to her husband/physician. Now unsure of her intellectual abilities, Alice Leigh relies on her husband to supply her with knowledge and support during social conversations: “I never can express what I mean. Sometimes I think I am clever, but when I talk it out I conclude that I am a fool. Tell me what I mean.”³⁰ Frequently her discussions of social issues are flavored with her husband's paternalistic views. Although she once fervently wished to be a doctor, Alice radically alters her perception of a woman's aptitude for medicine and comes to hold her husband's—and Mitchell's—belief that a woman should solely be educated in the area of domestic duties. Her friend Sibyl Maywood, a memorable invalid in Mitchell's fiction, shares this view and voices Mitchell's belief in a woman doctor's inability to exert control: “I do not think I should like to have a woman doctor. … Oh, I should never obey her—never; why, I could not say. I should have no confidence” (127).

Sibyl Maywood enters Dr. North's circle when North's friend Xerxes Claybourne hires his cousin Sibyl as his secretary to aid him in his scholarship. Sibyl has a physical disability that becomes the subject of much conversation throughout the novel. Victor St. Clair, the free-spirited, attractive bachelor artist, says: “She is lame and not quite erect” (34). Claybourne explains apologetically: “She is slightly, very slightly deformed, and halts” (35). Using more graphic, clinical terms, Owen North laments that Sibyl has a “maimed body” (76). One shoulder is slightly higher than the other, and she walks in a halting gait, but “above this crooked frame rose a head of the utmost beauty” (42). Anne Vincent regrets that Sibyl is not also “deformed of face” (35) because her physical beauty makes her attractive to men whereas her “crumpled figure” (65)—a spinal distortion resulting from childbirth—precludes her chances for marriage. Her physical deformity is presented as an impediment to marriage and thus true happiness.

When Sibyl falls in love with St. Clair, Dr. North and his wife worry that she will lose her heart, that her strong romantic nature coupled with her “physical incompleteness” (230) will lead St. Clair to spurn her. Although Sibyl displays a vast amount of knowledge throughout the novel, her intelligence is compromised by her fits of hysterical passion.³¹ Her friends Dr. and Mrs. North and Mrs. Vincent overlook her intellect—that she can cite Shakespeare and Goethe—and focus instead on her writing of anonymous poetic love letters to win the love of St. Clair. Alice and Owen North discover these letters, which they regard as dangerous folly because, in their opinion, St. Clair could never love a deformed person. St. Clair's initial rebuff worsens Sibyl's already unstable emotional condition and weakens her physical condition: she becomes nervous and anemic. Quickly intervening, Dr. North treats Sibyl with the Rest Cure and advises that Sibyl stop writing, rest after every meal, and give up her job as a secretary, because he believes that any type of work is too stressful for her. Exerting his power as a physician, he tells Sibyl that in order to become well again she must not become excited. He treats his patient like a child and exhibits a bedside manner similar to the physician/husband in “The Yellow Wallpaper.” Eager to cure herself of nervousness and anemia, Sibyl adheres to all the components of the Rest Cure without hesitation: “I am in bed by your orders, sir, at nine; also, I sleep at once and well” (232). She has confidence in Owen North, obeys her male doctor completely, and is miraculously—and implausibly—cured. Sibyl's physical and emotional ailments virtually disappear as a result of her devotion to the Rest Cure (“the halt in her gait is at times hardly visible” [486]), making her fit for marriage to Victor St. Clair.

Dr. John in “The Yellow Wallpaper” attempts to cure the nameless narrator, as Dr. North did Sibyl, but fails to understand her nature. Not a docile patient like Mitchell's Sibyl or readily susceptible to influence like Alice Leigh, Gilman's protagonist at first subverts Dr. John's treatment by writing secretly. Abandoning her timidity, which Sibyl sustains throughout Dr. North and His Friends, the protagonist of “The Yellow Wallpaper” “disagrees” with the diagnosis of the male medical authorities (10). Instead of dutifully climbing into bed after every meal as Sibyl Maywood does, Gilman's narrator escapes what she considers to be punitive rest by feigning sleep. She writes covertly, hiding her journal when she hears John approaching because he “hates to have [her] write a word” (13). If we conceive of the narrator and protagonist as one, she continues to defy John merely through the act of writing her story.³² Ironically, Gilman's narrator ultimately proves the dangerous consequences of her Rest Cure by remaining entrapped within the sanctity of the home. She actively explores the only text allowed to her—the yellow wallpaper in her prison/sanitarium. Her defiance leads her to crawl in madness in front of Dr. John, who faints before his wife. The nameless narrator of “The Yellow Wallpaper” shows the extreme consequences of living in a society in which the sanctified home proves confining to women. Gilman's narrator illuminates the dangers of following a rigid, restrictive therapeutic treatment. The narrator, though mad, defies the doctor's prescription for healthy eating, moderate exercise, and extended rest and chooses literal madness over John's cure for sanity. In defying her physician's attempt to suppress her, she writes herself into a position of power: she defiantly creeps over John but remains trapped within the home from which Gilman freed herself in order to stay “sane.”

Had Gilman's fiction followed Mitchell's prescription for female patients, the righteous Dr. John would not have been “floored”; rather, by following the Rest Cure, the narrator, like Alice Leigh, would have been cured of her ambition to develop her intellect. Gilman concludes that had she herself followed Mitchell's advice, her fate would have been similar to her own narrator's: “It was not a choice between going and staying, but between going, sane, and staying, insane” (Living, 97).

In “overwriting” his treatment and the choices available to Mitchell's protagonists, Gilman challenges the happy ending that Mitchell envisions for obedient women. The grimness of Gilman's ending calls attention to the compromises that Mitchell's women make even though they seemingly achieve a happy ending. Although Sibyl Maywood becomes physically cured through following Dr. North's rigid prescription, she does not use her intellectual abilities. In Dr. North and His Friends Alice Leigh gains social stature and respectability as Mrs. North, but she loses the very spirit that makes her a compelling female character at the beginning of Characteristics.

Rejecting Mitchell's advice—“‘And never touch pen, brush or pencil as long as you live’” (96)—Gilman defied Mitchell and the typical behavior he imposed on his female patients both within his medical practice and his fiction. Continuing to revise Mitchell's fictionalization of female patients, she wrote plays, stories, novels, and nonfiction, with Women and Economics (1898) bringing her international acclaim. Although she believed that she never fully recovered from the nervous breakdown brought on by the strains of marriage and motherhood, she concluded of her writing: “A brain may lose some faculties and keep others. … To write was always as easy to me as to talk. Even my verse, such as it is, flows as smoothly as a letter, is easier in fact” (Living, 98-99).³³

Although only “The Yellow Wallpaper” and Herland are well known today, Gilman was as prolific a writer as Mitchell. Like Mitchell's novels, her other fiction is formulaic, but her stock characters and the formula she prescribes diverge radically from his. Typically, through the intervention of an older woman, often a doctor, a young and innocent girl breaks from the restrictions or limitations that endanger her. For example, in “The Girl in the Pink Hat” (1916) a strong, older woman (whose occupation and name are never revealed) helps an innocent, courageous girl escape from the clutches of her criminal boyfriend who has deceived her about his intentions to marry her.

In “Mr. Peebles' Heart” (1914), Gilman's Dr. Joan Bascom appears to be the kind of physician Mitchell's Alice Leigh longed to be. In this story Gilman reverses the typical dynamics of the (male) doctor-(female) patient relationship. Dr. Bascom's brother-in-law suffers from a nervous breakdown that results, in her opinion, from his confining occupation, which proves necessary to support all the women who have clung to him with “tentacles.” Dr. Bascom demands the confidence of her male patient, who protests a bit but follows her advice as docilely as Mitchell's female patients do Dr. Owen North. She prescribes a very different cure than S. Weir Mitchell's enforced rest, however—two years of independent travel. Mr. Peebles returns younger, healthier, stimulated. Without her husband to depend upon during his absence, his wife gains independence. Both improve due to the intervention of Dr. Bascom, who serves as a “new woman” and a role model for women readers.

Gilman's commitment to advance the lives of women and her understanding of women's problems engage the reader more than the style of her writing, which sounds hastily crafted at times. Nonetheless, Gilman never lost her faculty to write: literature offered her an opportunity to challenge the restrictions imposed upon women. By writing numerous stories voicing her dedication to improve conditions for women, Gilman defied Mitchell and the ethos he used to describe women in his fiction. To call upon the apt title of one of Gilman's own poems, Mitchell became “An Obstacle”³⁴ both in real life and fiction, one that Gilman implicated in “The Yellow Wallpaper” and ultimately “overwrote” by touching pen and pencil as long as she lived.³⁵

Notes

1. Gilman was then Charlotte Perkins Stetson. She also published “The Yellow Wallpaper” under that name. For consistency, this article refers to her throughout as Gilman.

2. Gilman discusses S. Weir Mitchell's full prescription following her Rest Cure treatment in her autobiography, The Living of Charlotte Perkins Gilman: An Autobiography (New York: D. Appleton-Century, 1935), 96; hereafter cited as Living.

3. George Meredith was pleased with the results of a buttermilk diet S. Weir Mitchell had recommended, and he was enthusiastic about Mitchell's fiction; he considered Roland Blake Mitchell's best novel. Mitchell treated Walt Whitman occasionally and gave him funds to help him to continue writing. Suzanne Poirier notes, however, that “Mitchell's treatment of Jane Addams, Winifred Howells (daughter of William Dean Howells), and Charlotte Perkins Gilman, and the use of his treatment on Virginia Woolf caused cries of protest from all these women and their families” (15). Although Woolf never saw Mitchell, a British neurologist, Dr. Playfair, brought the Weir Mitchell Rest Cure to England in 1880 and encouraged its use. The treatment Woolf's physician, Dr. Savage, prescribed following her second breakdown in 1904 included a milk regimen, rest, and isolation. Although Woolf did not completely reject the treatment, she complained bitterly about it to friends and attacked it through her fiction such as Mrs. Dalloway (1925). In 1898 Edith Wharton traveled to Mitchell's sanitarium in Philadelphia to seek Mitchell's care. Her treatment was more moderate: not hospitalized, she remained in a hotel room and was allowed to write letters; however, she had enforced bed rest and was permitted no visitors for four months. For more information on Mitchell's treatment of male and female literary figures, see Suzanne Poirier, “The Weir Mitchell Rest Cure: Doctor and Patients,” Women's Studies Quarterly 10, no. 1 (1983): 15-40. For more discussion of Mitchell's relationship with Meredith and Whitman, see Ernest Earnest, S. Weir Mitchell: Novelist and Physician (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1950), 40, 99-100, 115; hereafter cited as Earnest.

4. Charlotte Perkins Gilman, The Yellow Wallpaper (Old Westbury: Feminist Press, 1973), 18; hereafter cited in the text.

5. The Definitive Edition of S. Weir Mitchell's oeuvre amounts to 6500 pages. The exact number of his short story volumes and novels remains unknown because he destroyed several of these works before they were actually published.

6. Hugh Wynne sold over one-half million copies and is often regarded as Mitchell's best book. In the foreword to S. Weir Mitchell: Novelist and Physician, Ernest Earnest writes that Mitchell's “Hugh Wynne was compared to Henry Esmond, his Ode on a Lycian Tomb to Lycidas.” Jeffrey Berman also makes this point in “The Unrestful Cure: Charlotte Perkins Gilman and ‘The Yellow Wallpaper,’” The Talking Cure: Literary Representations of Psychoanalysis (New York: New York University Press, 1985), 48; hereafter cited as Berman.

7. David Rein similarly states: “Mitchell's novels should be evaluated anew, for his accomplishments deserve to be recalled more widely and wrought into the tradition of American culture” (S. Weir Mitchell as a Psychiatric Novelist [New York: International Universities Press, 1952], 202); hereafter cited as Rein.

8. See Berman, 45-49, and Rein, 186-202. Berman's essay cites this important connection and discusses the range of Mitchell's fiction; however, his chapter does not explore the relationship between Gilman's fiction and Mitchell's.

9. Earnest, 227, and Regina Markell Morantz, “The Perils of Feminist History,” Women and Health in America, ed. Judith Walzer Leavitt (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1984), 239-45. In her criticism of Ann Douglas Wood's essay, “‘The Fashionable Diseases’: Women's Complaints and Their Treatment in Nineteenth-Century America,” The Journal of Interdisciplinary History 4 (1973): 25-52, Morantz offers a much more favorable reading of S. Weir Mitchell than Wood, Poirier, and Gilman's biographer Ann J. Lane, author of To Herland and Beyond: The Life and Work of Charlotte Perkins Gilman (New York: Pantheon Books, 1990); hereafter cited as Lane. Perturbed that Mitchell's personality “is so utterly distorted in Wood's characterization” (240), Morantz rebuts specific claims that Wood makes in her essay: that Mitchell believed that women doctors would always be inferior to male doctors, that doctors were gods, and that patients were to be docile children. She presents Mitchell as a neurologist, not a “woman's doctor” as Wood does; she also discusses the effective use of his treatment on soldiers suffering from battle fatigue as well as the praise Mitchell received from Freud.

10. Although Mitchell initially earned his reputation during the Civil War for his treatment of gunshot victims suffering from paralysis, he came to specialize in nervous diseases, which had plagued him as a young man. His first nervous breakdown occurred just after the Civil War, following the death of his young wife and his affluent Virginia physician father (who had initially opposed his decision to enter medicine); his second breakdown came three years after in 1872, following the death of his mother.

11. S. Weir Mitchell, Doctor and Patient (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1888), 117.

12. S. Weir Mitchell, Wear and Tear (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1871), 33.

13. S. Weir Mitchell, quoted in Lane, 117.

14. Mitchell did not anticipate that his female patients, under treatment, would continue to question and apply their creative minds as was the case with Gilman, who followed his treatment for one month.

15. S. Weir Mitchell, “Rest in Nervous Disease: Its Use and Abuse,” A Series of American Clinical Lectures, ed. E. C. Sequin, M.D., 1 (1875): 102.

16. S. Weir Mitchell, A Comedy of Conscience (New York: The Century Co., 1903), 8; hereafter cited in the text.

17. John was also S. Weir Mitchell's father's name and his son's name. Although the choice of name for the male protagonist in Mitchell's and Gilman's fiction may be merely coincidental, Characteristics was published prior to “The Yellow Wallpaper.”

18. Rein also makes this point and argues, “While the main story [of Roland Blake] is about quite normal people, the main attraction is in the abnormal minor characters” (Rein, 190). Octopia, however, is not as minor a character as he implies.

19. Mitchell describes these women in Fat and Blood as “nervous women, who as a rule are thin, and lack blood” (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1878), 7; hereafter cited in the text.

20. S. Weir Mitchell, Roland Blake (New York: The Century Co., 1901), 40; hereafter cited in the text.

21. In Fat and Blood, Mitchell describes this relationship and concludes “the nurse falls ill, and a new victim is found. I have seen an hysterical, anemic girl kill in this way three generations of nurses” (30).

22. S. Weir Mitchell, Constance Trescot (New York: The Century Co., 1909), 222; hereafter cited in the text.

23. Rein uses this term to describe Octopia Darnell in Roland Blake, Constance Trescot in Constance Trescot, and Ann Penhallow in Westways (1914), Mitchell's last novel. See his chapter “The Couch-Loving Invalids.”

24. Susan in Constance Trescot, like Olivia in Roland Blake, escapes her ministering role through marriage, and Constance goes abroad with a nursemaid.

25. These novels were not as well reviewed as some of Mitchell's other fiction. The Nation called Characteristics “not very exciting” but recognized that it was “sane and even in tone” (“More Novels,” Nation 55 [8 December 1892], 437). The style of Dr. North and His Friends received more stringent criticism: “Almost everybody who believes himself to be intelligent may be heard, at one time or another, expressing a regret that the age of conversation is past. An attempt to read the conversations between ‘Dr. North and His Friends’ is likely to stifle such regrets; indeed, to convert them into an ardent prayer that the art may not be revived, at least in our time” (“Recent Novels,” Nation 72 [28 February 1901], 182). The book was better received by the Critic, which called Dr. North and His Friends “a book such as only a wise and learned man could write, for it garners the wit and wisdom of a lifetime” (“Fiction,” Critic 37 [January 1901], 86). For more discussion of these and other works, see Rein, particularly his concluding chapter entitled “Mitchell as a Novelist” (178-202).

26. This point has been much debated between Wood and Morantz; while Wood claims that Mitchell believes “women doctors would always be inferior to male physicians” in “‘The Fashionable Diseases’” (228), Morantz finds no firm support for this claim in Fat and Blood or any of Mitchell's writings (240).

27. S. Weir Mitchell, Characteristics (New York: The Century Co., 1891), 234; hereafter cited in the text.

28. While Mitchell's females typically cry in front of their physicians, Gilman's narrator conceals her sobbing.

29. The end of Gilman's controversial story invites conflicting interpretations of entrapment and liberation. While many critics read the conclusion as a triumph, some argue that she is defeated, and others assert that she achieves a partial victory. For further reading on this range of interpretations, see The Captive Imagination: A Casebook on “The Yellow Wallpaper,” ed. Catherine Golden. (New York: Feminist Press, 1991).

30. S. Weir Mitchell, Dr. North and His Friends (New York: Century, 1900), 18; hereafter cited in the text.

31. Sibyl Maywood is described as having a dual personality who carries out passionate acts in a somnambulist state.

32. This issue has recently been raised by Paula Treichler and Richard Feldstein. See Paula A. Treichler, “Escaping the Sentence: Diagnosis and Discourse in ‘The Yellow Wallpaper,’” Tulsa Studies in Women's Literature 3 (1984): 61-77; Richard Feldstein, “Reader, Text, and Ambiguous Referentiality in ‘The Yellow Wallpaper,’” Feminism and Psychoanalysis, eds. Richard Feldstein and Judith Roof (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1989), 269-79.

33. Gilman mentions in her autobiography that she lost the ability to read for longer than a short period of time. She also had trouble learning languages and following indexes.

34. In her foreword to The Living of Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Zona Gale includes this poem along with “Similar Cases” as an indication of Gilman's constant preoccupation with the advance of women (xxxiii-xxxiv).

35. This essay grew out of a Collaborative Student-Faculty Research Grant funded by Skidmore College during the summer of 1990. Erin Senack, now Assistant to the Editor of Woman of Power magazine, was instrumental in the research involved in this project.