The short story, “The Yellow Wallpaper,” written in 1890 by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, gives a first person perspective of Weir Mitchells’ resting cure treatment for depressed women. This practice was inhumane in the eyes of the author who had gone through this treatment shortly before she began writing this piece. “The Yellow Wallpaper” shed light onto the downfalls of the resting cure and helped to spark a movement in improving mental health treatments for women.

The unnamed narrator of the piece seems critical of her summer stay in a secluded mansion, but fails to recognize her stay as the resting cure. In the beginning, the narrator regards her trip as a vacation that may rise her spirits, but her husband is clearly implementing the steps of treatment. In only a few months, the narrator drastically declines in mental health as her abilities were scorned and her womanly responsibilities were stripped away. The woman is prescribed “phosphates or phophites- whichever it is, and tonics, and journeys, and air, and exercise, and [is] absolutely forbidden to ‘work’ until [she is] well again.” and her husband, the physician, “hardly lets [her] stir without special direction.” (Gilman, 300). Her rehabilitation also includes “a schedule prescription for each hour in the day” and “making [her] lie down for an hour after each meal” (Gilman, 301, 307). All of which are staples of Weir Mitchells’ resting cure. The narrators form of treatment is considered lenient in comparison to the original resting cure practice, but even so, the narrator “believes that congenial work, with excitement and change, would do [her] good” and she feels as if she is forming “very bad habits” by following her husbands’ instructions (Gilman, 300, 307). The speaker even contemplates the idea that her husband being a physician may be “one reason [she doesn’t] get well faster,” but the notion is quickly repressed by the only question a woman in her situation could ask, “what is one to do?” (Gilman, 299). As the months pass, and the emotions of the narrator are consistently disregarded, she becomes entranced by the wallpaper in the former nursery she is kept in. The longer she resides in the room, the more she begins to hallucinate. She begins seeing eyes and movement within the paper and soon begins visualizing bars, symbolically entrapping her in her constant state of despair. Her husband John refuses to admit that his implication of the cure may not prove potent and he attempts to convince her that he knows how she feels better than she does because he is a doctor. When this method does not work he threatens to send his wife to Weir Mitchell himself, to which his wife fearfully wrote that she had absolutely no desire to go there because she “had a friend who was in his hands once, and she says he is just like John and my brother, only more so!” and due to the distaste she had for Johns’ moderate form of Mitchells’ resting cure, a more assiduous version would likely kill her. The emphasis of another woman also being at the mercy of the resting cure alludes to just how popular the treatment was for women in the late 1800s and the entirety of “The Yellow Wallpaper” emphasizes that there is no ‘one size fits all’ treatment for women’s mental health issues.

Charlotte Perkins Gilman was prescribed the resting cure for her post-partum depression before she wrote “The Yellow Wallpaper,” which makes the story semi-autobiographic. While Perkins “never had hallucinations or objections to her mural decorations” she remained adamant that Doctor Mitchells invasive psychotherapeutic exercises pushed women to the brink of insanity (Carolina Reader, 299). Perkins was inspired to write this piece in order to contradict the beaming reviews doctors and physicians were giving for this course of treatment. Her piece is daring and exceptional for her time because she had the audacity to publish a work opposing a glorified male doctor. Her short story reinstated the right for women to feel heard and respected in their time of need, and it helped to begin a movement for women’s rights.

The resting cure gained popularity after the seemingly remarkable recovery of a bed-ridden woman who had recently experienced tremendous amounts of great loss and was deemed “untouchable.” (Bassuk, 246). She was afflicted with so much pain that she could no longer care for herself or her family by the time Doctor Weir Mitchell was consulted. After he administered the resting cure treatment she was able to comfortably and happily travel the world with her husband. While the resting cure was less cruel than other conventional treatments of female nervous disorders at the time, it was certainly no less “sadistic, controlling, and intrusive.” (Bassuk, 245). Mitchell believed that women were “fundamentally inferior” to men and their treatment reflected those ideals (Bassuk, 251). As the treatment became more popular for women with nervous disorders, extreme measures were taken to disable the women until they no longer had the will to dispute what they were told to feel, an attempt John tried to make when his wife had the audacity to say she was not happy. The resting cure requires the patient to relinquish all control of self to the physician, and to overlook all of their own thoughts and emotions. In Weir Mitchells’ original treatment plan, the patient is not allowed to use their hands for the first several weeks of treatment and they are subjected to sponge baths, excessive seclusion, and spoon feeding for the entirety of treatment. They are also unable to see their families and are provided tonics and other medications much like the ones prescribed in “The Yellow Wallpaper.” Mitchells’ belief that nervous women were horribly selfish also led him to encourage other physicians to refrain from expressing sympathy and giving into their patients’ evil whims, explaining why John refused to remove the yellow wallpaper or to change rooms for his wife’s convenience. During the “moral reeducation” portion of the resting cure, patients were discouraged from ever sharing their feelings in the future, unless they intended to “make matters worse” (Bassuk, 248-249). Mitchell believed that “women should be more like men, but not equal to them,” which inspired the most despicable part of the treatment because the patients were made to believe their feelings were inadequate and disregarded, which thrusted the majority of them into further depression instead of curing it (Bassuk, 250). The resting cure forced women into never-ending submission exclusively because they were women. Mitchell suggested that women’s disorders were purely due to their femininity and these sexist ideals influenced mental health studies well into the next hundred years.

Today, mental illnesses have recognized differences and there has been extensive research of the diversity of issues.  There are individualized courses of treatment of different illnesses and problems such as post partum depression. Wide varieties of illnesses are no longer lumped together and given the same treatment. There are even websites specially designed to assist women with their particular ailment, for example, one site helps women conquer post partum depression by giving women information about different medications and therapy options that can drastically improve the lives of the 15% of mothers with this problem (Postpartum Progress). This is the outcome that Charlotte Perkins Gilman aimed to achieve when she exposed some of the greatest issues in the obtainability of non-invasive mental health treatments for women. While many women were still subjected to this horrible treatment, Gilman’s writing ignited a movement for the improvement of research and the expansion of mental health resources.

Charlotte Perkins bravely used her own experience as the basis of this piece and dramatized an extreme outcome to dispute the resting cure. The controversial treatment at the time was being exalted by doctors and privileged men, and heavily berated by women. Her work illuminates the suppression of women and the lack of mental health research during the late 1800s.
