In the late nineteenth century, mental illness was a topic of much controversy and confusion. Nobody really knew how to diagnose certain behaviors and when it came down to the men physicians and authority figures, they often decided that any behaviors that seemed unusual to them could be qualified as hysteria or insanity. There was an influx of patients being tossed in to asylums and mental hospitals for simple things and they were being treated terribly by the people who were supposed to be there to help them. In the book “Ten Days in a Mad-House” by Nellie Bly, Bly actually manages to get her sane-self admitted into an insane asylum in order to observe the medical practices taking place and the conditions the patients had to live in. In the story “The Yellow Wallpaper” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, the author tells the story of a sane woman who is told she is insane, and the conditions she is forced to live in is what forces her to slip into insanity. By reading and comparing these two texts, it is possible to observe two opposite view points, with one being sane and the other insane, on the issue of mental hospitals and how the supposedly mentally ill were treated at the time.

A common theme between the two texts which is important is the similarities between the doctors in “Ten Days in a Mad-House” and the husband and brother to the woman in “The Yellow Wallpaper”. In both texts, they serve as the biggest opposition to the allegedly insane women. The husband in “The Yellow Wallpaper” issues his own wife into his own sort of pseudo-asylum. He creates a room which completely isolates her from the rest of the world because he believes it will help her heal from her “illness” which is just a little nervousness she has. “Personally, I disagree with their ideas”(Gilman 300), she says, but her husband doesn’t listen to or take anything she says seriously. These actions are very similar to those of the doctors in “Ten Days in a Mad-House”. At the beginning of the text, a new patient of the asylum says she is not crazy, but must wait for an opportunity to escape the place. She says “‘There will be few, though, if all the doctors, as Dr. Field, refuse to listen to me or give me a chance to prove my sanity.’”(Bly 281). Just like the husband, the doctors don’t take their patients seriously and just treat them as insane with no real proof of that being true. Nellie Bly is being the voice for the patients who never were given the opportunity to plead their case. She listened in as another patient, Tillie Mayard, tried to prove her sanity, declaring she would take any test they had in order to prove it, but “Without one word of sympathy or encouragement she was brought back to where [they] sat.”(Bly 282). Just like the wife in “The Yellow Wallpaper” who was ignored by her husband, Miss Mayard was never listened to by the doctors even when she speaks with the upmost sanity. It is troubling to see how in two completely separate texts, the women are mistreated so similarly by the people who are supposed to be healing them. When reading about the woman in “The Yellow Wallpaper” one must take caution because it is uncertain when exactly the woman becomes insane. She begins her story a sane woman, just as Nellie Bly did, but she couldn’t handle the “treatments” from her husband and eventually slipped into insanity. However, the point of view of Nellie Bly in “Ten Days in a Mad-House” is unquestionably from a sane person which verifies that that sort of “treatment” was actually being performed at the time. 

The stories from both “Ten Days in a Mad House” and “The Yellow Wallpaper” agree with all other information there is on the treatment of female mental illnesses at the time. Readers can verify that what the woman in “The Yellow Wallpaper” was telling us could very well be an identical experience of actual women in the late nineteenth century. “Until the 19th century, people with mental illness were cared for by family members, who quietly attended to their needs in rural areas.”(Holtzman 24). Being taken care of by family members, in most cases male family members, was a common practice until the rise of mental asylums in the next several decades. Although it is difficult to trust what the woman is saying because she gradually slips into insanity, her story can be backed up by the way countless other women were controlled in their own homes by their male counterparts such as husbands and brothers. By comparing these two texts, it is shown how the malpractices of home care segues into the way asylums were run too. Male dominated staff controls the patients just as at homes and they aren’t given a chance to prove themselves. On Nellie Bly’s first encounter with the superintendent, “His voice was as cold as the hall, and the patients made no movement to tell him of their sufferings. I asked some of them to tell how they were suffering from the cold and insufficiency of clothing, but they replied that the nurse would beat them if they told.”(Bly 293). If a woman who is supposed to be in an asylum to be cured of her mental illness is afraid of the person that is supposed to be helping her, how is she going to get better? They can’t ask for help and they don’t even know why they are there for the most part. In both texts, the main reason for the patients suffering is their inability to be able to communicate with their male controllers, the women have no power and are not worth the men’s time it seems.

There are two sides to each text; in “The Yellow Wallpaper” the woman experiences both sides and in the “Ten Days in a Mad House” Nellie Bly witnesses both sides and is able to record them. The first side is the hope and actual sanity that persists in the asylum and in the woman’s isolated bedroom. The woman in the “The Yellow Wallpaper” begins the story completely sane with just a little nervousness and is hopeful for a good recovery once her husband isolates her from the rest of the world. Even though she doesn’t think his methods is what she needs, she trusts him and accepts it. Similarly, Nellie Bly became acquainted with patients who showed no signs of insanity or hysteria, but were still subjected to the punishment like healing methods of the asylum, “And yet despite the harrowing brutality she both witnessed and experienced, Bly was a true believer in the human spirit and noted, amidst the cesspool of cruelty, the kindness of the few individuals who chose to rise above the poisonous atmosphere that turned others into monsters.”(Popova 1). She knew there was hope for those misplaced in to the institution and believed they could still succeed. But there was always the other side of the spectrum too. The downfall of patients who couldn’t withstand the unnecessary punishments and treatment methods of those who controlled them. Nellie Bly notes, “Here is a class of women sent to be cured. I would like the expert physicians who are condemning me for my action, which has proven their ability, to take a perfectly sane and healthy woman, shut her up and make her sit from 6 A.M. until 8 P.M. on straight-back benches, do not allow her to talk or move during the hours, give her no reading and let her know nothing of the world or its doings, give her bad food and harsh treatment, and see how long it will take to make her insane. Two months would make her a mental and physical wreck.”(Bly 293).This slow plunge into insanity is exactly what happens to the woman in “The Yellow Wallpaper” and both texts reflect the same themes of mistreatment and each compliments each other to show the full story of these misunderstood women.

The two texts “The Yellow Wallpaper” and “Ten Days in a Mad House” complement each other in telling the story of thousands of women in the nineteenth century. By showing the treatment of women perceived to be mentally ill by both a sane and insane perspective, it allows the reader to see the whole issue of the men dominated psychiatric world which was the 19th century.
