




Modern treatments of mental disorders such as schizophrenia and hysteria have drastically changed since the Victorian era. During the Victorian era, women were sentenced to prolonged time in bed to help their disease. This later became known as the rest cure. The gender role of women to work domestically at home was prominent throughout society during this time. However, in The Yellow Wallpaper, the narrator is confined to one room and limited to not doing any type of work. This confinement leads the narrator to drive herself more insane because she is not able to interact and talk about her problems. Having knowledge of the Victorian era allows the reader to understand why a woman with a mental disorder would be confined to one room expecting to get better on her own with no help of a doctor or medications, instead of being treated properly with social interaction. 

Dressing to the nines on a daily basis, women in the mid 1800s were courted at a young age. Their daily duties of cooking and cleaning at home allowed for them to raise and nurture their children as was expected of them. This left women isolated to the same environment on a daily basis but this also allowed them to still be involved with the culture around them. Keeping up with the trendy fashion by wearing corsets and heavy dresses when out in public lead to common headaches and fainting spells, which was labeled as hysteria. Hysteria was primarily a problem in women - the reasoning of why this disease was thought to be more common in women was due to their emotional level. In the story, The Yellow Wallpaper, the narrator experiences this hysteria and describes her experience, as she is being so called “treated.”  

Through the narration readers are able to see how this treatment of isolation and rest is actually making her worse. In this time period, a woman’s opinion about her own body was overlooked by a physician’s treatment plan. The narrator’s husband prescribed her to rest in bed with a lifeless schedule and no work. In replacement, he brings in his sister to be the woman of the house. The narrator expresses how her opinion is not valued by saying “Personally, I believe that congenial work, with excitement and change, would do me good. But what is one to do?” (Gilman 300). This shows how even though a woman, who knows her own body, was not taken seriously based on the expectations of treatment for a woman in the Victorian society. 

The Weir Mitchell treatment process was well known, but very complex back in time of which it was practiced. It consisted of four sections of treatment: over feeding, electric massage, isolation and bed rest. A belief back then was that irregular brain cells and a lack of nutrition to those cells caused hysteria. Overfeeding was a treatment due to Mitchell’s thought of “easier to fatten resting patients than ambulatory ones” (Jones 25). The patients were bed ridden for 6 weeks, creating the name, “the rest cure”.  The rest cure itself was to improve the overall state of a person’s health, in which most cases the rest cure was put in place for women. The treatment that the doctors found most successful back then was isolation of the patient. At first the patients seemed to show signs that improved their hysteria, but in the long run it turned around to affect their condition negatively and caused self-destruction. This relates back to the narrator because she first shows signs of admiration and fondness towards the house using words like “beautiful” and “delicious” then later describes the room as “dull”, “revolting”, and “unclean”. 

Confined in a yellow room labeled as a nursery, inside a “haunted” house, the narrator analyzes her environment and the wallpaper out of boredom. She describes the wallpaper’s patterns and designs by using derogatory language such as “irritate,” “confuse,” and “commit suicide.” The confinement the narrator endures allows her to speak of the wallpaper as though it can physically and mentally harm her. The reader can refer back to the end of the novel that her original diagnosis of nervousness does not limit her to function normally as she writes in her journal to express her thoughts and feelings. She incorporates social interaction with her own mind. The rest and isolation she is prescribed drives her imagination to run wild, allowing her to hallucinate and have the delusions of a woman stuck behind the yellow wallpaper. This is an illusion to her own self with reference of what she feels like, being trapped in the yellow room. John, her husband, believes she will get better when she wants too signifying she can treat this illness on her own - this references the Weir Mitchell’s treatment of isolation and bed rest. Although the narrator was prescribed the Weir Mitchell treatment plan it did not help her get better.

Schizophrenia has symptoms of hallucinations and delusions and or paranoia, which are shown by the narrator in the story. Helping guide a person through the daily conflicts of schizophrenia starts with adapting to the norm of social skills and problem-solving skills. Problem solving skills involves thinking through a situation rationally and logically. A structural mechanism to deal with everyday problems is needed for a person with schizophrenia. SCALE is an acronym for a five-step process used by psychiatrists that walks through problem solving skills and how to carry them out. S stands for “specify the problem”, C stands for “consider all possible solutions”, A stands for “assess the best solution”, L stands for “lay out a plan”, and E stands for “execute and evaluate the outcome.” Carrying out the process SCALE to workout problems can improve depression and increase social skills of a person who has schizophrenia. Interpersonal conflict and conflict with the outside world happens on a daily basis and for a person with schizophrenia to develop these skills they need help and guidance to be able to interact with others. Social skills allow for a person to communicate their thoughts and interact in a group environment. Group therapy and interaction with others helps with the treatment process and allows people with this disease to appropriately function in society. Practicing scenarios of how to listen and engage successfully can give the patient confidence to reach their goal of getting back into the real world. This modern treatment does not show bias against genders like Weir Mitchell’s treatment the “rest cure” did. The narrator would have benefitted from the SCALE mechanism because it would allow her to engage in the lifestyle of “normal women” in the Victorian era. 

Because the narrator in The Yellow Wallpaper is a woman in the Victorian era, she is deprived of this proper treatment for her mental illness due to the gender roles of society. If she was prescribed a more modern treatment such as the SCALE method, which does not discriminate based on gender, her outcome would have most likely been positive. Gilman’s story of The Yellow Wallpaper influenced the start of disregarding “the resting cure” as credible treatment. Since then, improvements on mental disorder treatments have come a long way to help the lives of people dealing with these disorders. 





