#rest cure

Women suffering from neurasthenia were given the treatment that resulted in Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s classic short story “The Yellow Wallpaper.” Her “nerve doctor,” Silas Weir Mitchell, regularly proscribed bed-rest, force-feeding, and total abstention from creative work for women. Even reading was banned. “Live as domestic a life as possible,” said the specialist to his women patients.

It may come as no surprise that Dr. Mitchell prescribed something entirely different for male neurasthenics. He sent them West, to the great outdoors. One of his patients, Owen Wister, wrote the first modern western. Barbara Will connects these facts in her examination of the “nervous origins of the American western,” published in American Literature in 1998.

1. What was the hook? "I am sitting by the window in this atrocious nursery." And then, "John laughs at me, of course, but one expects that in marriage." In two lines we have confinement, a husband who dismisses her, and a narrator who is already writing in secret. The hook is not horror, it is that quiet, domestic dismissal.

2. Character notes: how many characters and what made them feel real, what are their motives? The Narrator / Jane: No name until the very end, but we know everything about her inner life. Writer, new mother, diagnosed with temporary nervous depression. Motive at first is to get well and be a good wife. Motive later becomes to understand the paper. What makes her real is her double consciousness, she performs wellness for John while documenting her own deterioration in dead paper.

John: Husband, physician of high standing, practical in the extreme. No patience with faith, intense horror of superstition. Motive is control disguised as care. "What is it, little girl?" He infantilizes. He means well, which makes him more terrifying.

Jennie: John's sister, housekeeper, perfect and careful. She polices the narrator. "I think it is the paper that keeps her so quiet." She is what the narrator is supposed to become.

Mary and the baby: Absent presences. Mary is so good with the baby that the narrator is not allowed to be with him because it makes her nervous. The baby is the reason for the rest cure and the reason she feels guilt.

The Woman in the paper: At first a figure that skulks behind the front design, then many women creeping, then finally the narrator herself. Her motive is to get out.

3. What point of view and why? First person, present tense, journal entries / diary. Gilman needs this claustrophobic immediacy. It is unreliable but in the way trauma is unreliable, we see the wallpaper more clearly as she loses clarity about everything else. Because it is "dead paper and a great relief to my mind," we are complicit. We are the only ones she can tell the truth to.

4. How did the author create setting? Through confinement details that get more sinister. The colonial mansion, hereditary estate, three miles from the village, hedges and walls and gates that lock. The nursery at the top of the house, the whole floor nearly, with windows that look all ways but are barred for little children, rings and things in the walls, floor scratched and gouged and splintered, heavy bed nailed down. The garden is beautiful, delicious, with box bordered paths and gnarly trees and a private wharf, but she can only see it from the window. And the paper itself as setting: repellant, smouldering unclean yellow, dull yet lurid orange in some places and sickly sulphur in others, one of those sprawling flamboyant patterns committing every artistic sin. The setting is a literal rest cure prison that becomes a mind.

5. What is the tension and when does it appear? From paragraph 2. External: Woman versus medical establishment. John and her brother, also a physician of high standing, assure her there is really nothing the matter but temporary nervous depression, a slight hysterical tendency. She is forbidden to work until she is well again. She has a schedule prescription for each hour. The more she obeys, the sicker she gets.

Internal: The paper. At first annoyance, then study, then obsession. "The color is repellant... I get positively angry with the impertinence of it." Then "there is a recurrent spot where the pattern lolls like a broken neck and two bulbous eyes stare at you upside down." Then she sees a strange, provoking, formless sort of figure behind the front design.

Climax tension is final two pages: She is creeping. The woman is out. John comes home, finds her locked in, she has stripped the paper off in great patches. "I have got out at last, in spite of you and Jane." The tension resolves not with cure but with complete identification.

6. Structure / scene shifts / time, etc. Diary structure, fragmented entries marked by ellipses and dashes. Early entries are longer, coherent, talk about the house, the ghostliness, the garden. Middle entries get shorter, more fixated on the paper, time markers like "We have been here two weeks" and "Well, the Fourth of July is over!" Final entries collapse time. No dates, just creeping. Day and night blur. Scene shifts are not physical, they are visual shifts in the paper: front pattern vs back pattern, daylight vs moonlight, when the sun is just so. The structure mimics a case study that becomes a haunting. It starts as a husband's case notes would want, and ends as the patient's testimony.

7. Dialogue notes: what purpose each line holds, what is left unsaid? Almost no direct dialogue, which is the point. She is not listened to. John's lines are textbook gaslighting as care: "What is it, little girl?" "Really, dear, you are better!" "I am a doctor, dear, and I know." "You know the place is doing you good." Every line closes conversation.

Her own dialogue is internal, whispered to paper: "Personally, I disagree with their ideas." "But what is one to do?" That repeated "What is one to do?" is the most important unsaid dialogue, it is the voice of every woman told her suffering is not real.

What is left unsaid is everything about postpartum depression, anger, sexuality, creativity. She never says I hate my husband. She says the paper hates me.

8. What makes the narrator's voice unique? How does it affect tone of the story? Childlike and analytical at once. She uses exclamation, dashes, repetition, and second person aside. "I used to lie awake as a child and get more entertainment and terror out of blank walls and plain furniture than most children could find in a toy store." That voice makes the horror intimate. The tone shifts from wry and observant to frantic and flat. By the end, the voice that once said "That spoils my ghostliness, I am afraid" says "I have got out at last." The tone moves from gothic amusement to feminist horror without ever raising its voice.

9. Symbols and their deeper meaning: The yellow wallpaper: The patriarchy, the rest cure itself, marriage, the domestic sphere, creative work stifled. Pattern committing every artistic sin that she is forbidden to commit herself. The color, smouldering unclean yellow, is sickness, decay, postpartum body.

The nursery: Infantilization. She is treated as a child. Barred windows and nailed bed and rings in walls suggest not a nursery but an asylum or prison.

The woman creeping: All women who have been confined. The narrator at first sees one, then many women creeping outside in the garden, stooping and hidden. Creeping is what women must do when they are not allowed to walk.

The key, the gate, the locked door: Control. He has the key. At the end she throws the key down, locks herself in.

The rope, the bedstead: The final image of her creeping around the room, her shoulder fits in that long smooch around the wall. She has worn a path. She has been there a long time.

10. Theme truth of the story: If you forbid a person from work, company, and expression and tell her that her reality is not real, you will make her sick, then call it proof she was sick all along. Gilman wrote it to save Dr. Weir Mitchell's patients. The truth is: Confinement as cure is violence. Also, to write, even in secret on dead paper, is to survive. Imagination is not the symptom, it is the attempt at escape.

11. Prose / craft notes: Gilman uses repetition of pattern language: sprawling, flamboyant, lolls, waddles, irritates, provokes study. The sentences about the paper get longer and more tangled as she unravels. She uses doubling: two bulbous eyes, two breaths that didn't match, one a little higher than the other. She withholds the final pronoun shift until the very last page. When she says "I wonder if they all come out of that wallpaper as I did?" the I has become plural, all women. The famous final fainting of John is craft: the rational man who said there is nothing the matter faints, the hysterical woman does not.

12. The ending / impact? She has completely become the woman in the paper. "I've got out at last, said I, in spite of you and Jane. And I've pulled off most of the paper, so you can't put me back!" She is creeping over his fallen body.

Rip E.W Hornung you would have loved ao3

"WARDEN IRVINE CRITICALLY ILL," Kingston Daily Standard. May 7, 1913. Page 1. ---- He Left To-day For Montreal For Treatment. ---- Col. Irvine, warden of the Penitentiary, is very critically ill from chronic complaint, and left to-day for Montreal, where he will enter a hospital. His condition is such, it is understood that he has been ordered by his physician to leave the penitentiary and take a rest.

About two weeks ago Col. Irvine took a chill, which developed into a severe cold. This brought on chronic ailment, malarial ague, from which the warden has been a long sufferer. He has been unable to at tend to his duties at the penitentiary for some time, and was confined to his room at the British American Hotel for the past ten days. Instead of improving, however, he has steadily declined in health.

"DUNNING SAILS IN SEARCH OF HEALTH," Montreal Gazette. August 5, 1939. Page 11. ---- Seeking a rest in England to regain his lost health, Hon. Charles A. Dunning, Minister of Finance, sailed from Montreal yesterday in the liner Montelare. He is seen here ascending the gangway into the ship, followed by several friends, Alan Jones, John Bassett. H. R. Cockfield and Hon. J. L. Ralston. Mr. Dunning, who sailed alone, went immediately to his cabin aboard the liner, but appeared at a porthole as the ship was sailing to wave good-by to his wife, his son, Avery, and his daughter. Kay. Forced out of active politics by ill health, Mr. Dunning recently tendered his resignation, but it was not accepted. He will be abroad for some time.

View of The Inn at Charlevoix, Michigan. Printed on front: "The Inn, Charlevoix-the-Beautiful, Mich." Printed on back: "Made in U.S.A. by E.C. Kropp Co., Milwaukee, Wis." Handwritten on back: "You know how indifferent I was about coming up but am glad now to be here. The days have been hot but the nights are nice & cool. Have been out so much need by the time I get back I'm thinking I'll need the 'Rest Cure.' Love, Rae C. Levy." Card is postmarked July 13, 1937.