Women and Gender Studies
Of all the technologies and cultural phenomena human beings have created, language, and particularly writing, is arguably the most powerful, because it is the means by which all human experience is expressed and ordered. As such, controlling who is allowed to write, and in a modern context, be published, is one of the most effective means of controlling society. This fact was painfully clear to women writers throughout history because women were frequently prohibited from receiving the same education as men, and as the struggle for gender equality began to read a critical mass near the end of the nineteenth century, control over women's access to education and writing became a central theme in a number of authors' works, whether they considered themselves feminists or not. In particular, Charlotte Perkins Gilman's 1892 story The Yellow Wallpaper features this theme prominently, and Virginia Woolf's extended essay A Room of One's Own confronts it directly, revealing "the extent to which the patriarchal pressures of that period posed severe obstacles" to women (Ramos 145). By considering The Yellow Wallpaper in light of Woolf's arguments about the power of education and writing to restrict or liberate, as well as Gertrude Stein's lecture "Composition as Explanation," one is able to see how restrictions on female education and literary expression in may ways represent the underlying basis for the perpetuation of all other modes of gender inequality and female disempowerment, and furthermore, how The Yellow Wallpaper represents a kind of horrible ideal of this phenomenon.
Before considering these three works in conjunction, it will be useful to briefly discuss the notion of the "rest cure," because it plays a central role in Gilman's story and, as will be seen, represents a particularly developed form of the ever-changing means by which female agency, especially in regards to writing, has been restricted and condemned. Based on a woefully ignorant understanding of psychology (and in the case of The Yellow Wallpaper, postpartum depression), the "rest cure" was supposedly intended to help people "who've broken down under stress of too much worry and strenuous living" (Saki 128, qtd. In Lane 784). The individual undergoing the rest cure is prohibited from any kind of strenuous activity, and in the case of Gilman's narrator, is "absolutely forbidden to 'work' [meaning write] until" she recovers (Gilman 3). Gilman herself was forced to undergo this "cure" when her physician, Weir Mitchell (who is mentioned in the story) enforced "strict isolation, limit[ed] intellectual stimulation to two hours a day, and forbid her to touch pen, pencil, or paintbrush ever gain" (Bak 39).
One need not go into detail about psychology or physiology in order to point out the central flaw in the rest cure, because this flaw has little to do with science and much more to do with a fundamental miscategorization of different kinds of activity. That is to say, proponents of the rest cure assume that strenuous activity in general, whether physical or mental, is the cause of whatever particular psychological malady, without any regard for the actual emotional or psychological effect that activity has on the individual. Put another way, the rest cure assumes that stimulation is the problem, and as such a lack of stimulation is cure, rather than acknowledging that different modes of stimulation have different effects, and that prohibiting the individual from experiencing any and all stimulation can actually exacerbate the problem, rather than cure it.
That the rest cure was used disproportionately to control women is evidenced by the fact that it fits quite nicely into a pseudo-scientific discourse about women's health that has persisted even until very recently, a discourse that views women as inherently more fragile or delicate than men, both physically and mentally. While this discourse has existed in some form throughout recorded history, it reached new heights of social acceptability when it received the imprimatur of "science" through psychoanalytic discussions of women's perceived "hysterical tendency" near the end of the nineteenth century (Gilman 2). The diagnosis of hysteria depends upon one of the many false dichotomies purporting to describe inherent differences between the sexes, and in this case the supposed dichotomy between reason and emotion, as embodied by male and female, respectively. The rest cure and its psychoanalytic underpinnings were so closely tied to this false dichotomy that "prominent medical authorities [argued] that the pursuit of masculine activities [such as education and writing] could actually damage or retard women physiologically, an unsexing that...
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