The Nursery at the Top of the House: "The Yellow Wallpaper" and the Patriarchal Underpinnings of Women's Institutionalization in the Nineteenth Century

     In an 1831 publication of Godey’s Lady’s Book, an anonymously written article entitled “Nervous Disorders of Females” asserts that women are predisposed to mental illness due to their “lack of rational... [ view full abstract ]

     In an 1831 publication of Godey’s Lady’s Book, an anonymously written article entitled “Nervous Disorders of Females” asserts that women are predisposed to mental illness due to their “lack of rational employment” and “disordered imagination,” both of which threaten their overall “health and innocence”. In Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s 1892 short story “The Yellow Wallpaper,” the detrimental implications of this psychiatric ideology are manifest: diagnosed by her husband as having a “slight hysterical tendency,” the narrator is subjected to a treatment that disconnects her from “society and stimulus” and results in her ultimate psychological undoing. Through recognizing the patriarchal justifications by which nineteenth-century women were determined mentally ill and the oppressive treatment they received within asylums, my research considers the ways in which the narrator’s diagnosis and medical care in “The Yellow Wallpaper” illuminate the powerful connection between cultural expectations of femininity and nineteenth-century beliefs in women’s psychiatry.

     To illustrate the patriarchal foundation of the mental-health profession during the nineteenth century and its expression within Gilman’s short story, my study examines a variety of primary and secondary sources that include autobiographical accounts of women’s institutionalization, academic analyses of female psychological care, and patient records from a nineteenth-century asylum. In identifying the psychiatric privilege given to rational thought over imagination, the pathologization of female education, and the effort to disempower the female voice through institutional isolation, the sources significantly elucidate the androcentric values that underpin the narrator’s experience in “The Yellow Wallpaper”. Further, I highlight the relationship between women’s institutionalization in the nineteenth century and the ideals of Victorian femininity to demonstrate the compelling intersection between the “insanity” of Gilman’s narrator and her subversion of the four pillars of True Womanhood. By analyzing the narrator’s psychological condition in “The Yellow Wallpaper” within a wider historical and cultural context, I contend that an ideological understanding of the asylum—and the process by which women were institutionalized—is essential in recognizing the influence of hegemonic masculinity on the nineteenth-century philosophy of female psychiatric care.