“The Yellow Wallpaper” was written in 1892 by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, who was an activist in the woman’s movement. In the story, the narrator is being treated with a therapy called the rest cure. Her husband, who is also her physician, locks her away in the top of their house to get better with complete rest and no outside contact. He tells her she has a nervous depression and this is the best treatment. The narrator has no stimulation, and we see her getting progressively worse. The story leads us to wonder if the rest cure can drive a patient closer to insanity or if this is just a story where one person did not get better? To make an assumption that the rest cure is ineffective after only reading “The Yellow Wallpaper” would lack depth. Further research into non-fictional contexts must be explored to back up my hypothesis that it was indeed ineffective and add credibility to my opinion. 

Before revealing my historical findings, let me explain further why the story “The Yellow Wallflower” causes me to doubt the effectiveness of the rest cure. There is a passage where the narrator herself reveals her opinion and the story starts to shift. “Personally, I disagree with their ideas. Personally, I believe that congenial work with excitement and change would do me good. But what is one to do?” (Gilman, 300) In this journal entry, the narrator is being forced against her will to comply with a treatment she doesn’t believe is right for her. She is told she has a nervous disorder and needs to rest. She is questioning and thinking, but like the narrator says “what is one to do?” What is she to do when her physician (who is her husband) prescribes her a treatment she disagrees with?  She couldn’t deny her husband or a male doctor’s order, so she took it and tried to make the best of it. 

A little later in this passage, the narrator goes on a rant about the house. She describes to us how beautiful it is but also mentions how she is alone it the house. She finds no comfort in the big beautiful house that has a garden, because of her isolation. Seeing her get more depressed it makes us, the readers, feel empathy for her and wonder if the treatment is making her better or worse. We feel compassion for a sick woman who is alone. She has only herself and her mind. Throughout the passage, we see the narrator shift in attitude from being hopeful and trusting in the beginning, to becoming sad and mad. She feels abandoned and left to help herself. This passage raised the question in my mind of the effectiveness of the rest cure and influenced my opinion to say that it is not a good treatment. 

In researching historical and literary context about the rest cure, I discovered that the debate concerning whether “resting” is an effective treatment for patients has been discussed for well over a century. The concept was first developed by Silas Weir Mitchell in the late 1800s. It was a treatment for patients who suffered from nervous disorders and consisted of doing nothing but resting. No outside contact, no exercise, and no reading and writing. It was considered a great advance in medicine at the time, but has continued to be questioned ever since. In the article, “Putting the Rest Cure to Rest – Again,” Michael Sharpe of Edinburg University Department of Psychology, weighs in on the subject. Should patients that complain of exhaustion or extreme anxiety be told to rest or should they be prescribed exercise and social interaction to help the condition? Some psychologists suggest the “rest cure” theory was not sophisticated enough and others such as Richard Asher thought it could actually be dangerous. Studies later backed up Asher’s theories by showing poor sleep habits, signs of chronic fatigue syndrome, loss of muscle strength, and lethargic feelings.  In the article by Sharpe, he points out evidence suggesting that patients should be accurately diagnosed and treatment should include exercise. Common sense and individual circumstances should be considered. The patient should be consulted and a moderate plan to restore health the goal. Sharpe demonstrates his opinion against the Victorian “rest cure” as a treatment, and encourages the reader to dismiss it as well. 

But the historical text raises the question, why exercise over rest? Regular exercise improves the brain memory, cognitive thinking skills, and prevents depression. The narrator struggles with depression and exercise would have helped. The narrator’s humanity was at sake and instead of helping her fight for it, John placed her on a treatment that only made things worse.

In another historical context, Silas Weir Mitchell and “rest cure” by JMS Pearce, he also disagrees with the effectiveness of the treatment. In Pearce’s excerpt from his book, he tells how the patient is placed in complete isolation: “When it comes to eating you are fed and cleaned up after- you are treated like an infant.” (Pearce, 75) Pearce tells us that Mitchell’s first studies were based on soldiers during the civil war and later women with hysteria and often anorexia. Women became the main target of Mitchell’s treatment and usually against their will. The intentions were good, like keeping the patient alive and out of asylums, but the reactions from the patients were atrocious. This second piece of a historical context is a medical journal and shows how women treated in this time period were expected to submit to men blindly. They did what they were told. Both of these historical contexts are relevant and back up my claim that after reading the story “The Yellow Wallpaper”, the rest cure was ineffective. 

To come full circle with my specific claim that the rest cure is not a good treatment, I take one final look at the fictional story of “The Yellow Wallpaper”. The story written by Gilman tells us things that the historical sources did not. Historical contexts don’t delve into the feelings and emotions that literature does.  The story is written in first person by a female and therefore we finally get a glimpse of a woman’s perspective which was not allowed at that time. We see how she slips into eventual insanity by focusing all her time on the wallpaper, finding patterns and the mysterious girl she imagines is trapped in the wall. Her depression and isolation cause her to identify with this imaginary woman and in the end, she drives herself hopelessly insane to the point of violently ripping off the wallpaper in an attempt to save herself. The effect the treatment has on her is quite the opposite as intended. The more she “rests” the more she thinks. The more she thinks, the more anxiety she experiences. We see her get progressively worse until she is thrown into a downward spiral that we experience through her own words and feelings of terror. The effect of reading the story in first person (by a female) adds to the reader’s empathy. The anxiety portrayed in the story cannot be found by simply reading historical contexts by men, and therefore makes me more passionate in my hypothesis. This also begs the question of the relationship between psychiatry and the patriarch husband.  Women at this time period were lower is status than men, especially a male physician. John forced the narrator against her will to undergo this “cure” because he is the dominant male in her life and believes he has total control over her. This could have a direct correlation on her diminishing physiological health.  

At the beginning of this paper I stated that after reading “The Yellow Wallpaper”, I believed the rest cure treatment to be ineffective. After looking at historical resources that backed up my claim, and then again at the story, I am confident in my idea that isolation and resting alone are not an effective treatment for depression. Only by examining both sources do I feel completely comfortable in suggesting that you, the reader, should agree.
