The Patriarchal Silencing and Isolation of the

Madwoman

 

 

Introduction

            What does it mean for one to be “mad”?  The simple

dictionary definitions of the word offer only a slight insight

into the world of someone considered by society to be

mad.  Dictionary.com defines “mad” as “Suffering from a disorder

of the mind; insane” or “lacking in restraint or reason;

foolish.”  The only problem with these definitions, though, is

that there is no mention of the need for restraint, only the lack

thereof, or the necessity of incarcerating someone who is

considered mad.  Yet, many “mad” people, especially women, are or

will be locked away – kept from a society in which they might be

able to flourish if they were not considered “mad,” receiving

therapy or some kind of treatment that might one day assist them

in joining society as “sane” individuals. 

Madness--as a label or reality--is not conceived of as

divine, prophetic, or useful. It is perceived as (and often

further shaped into) a shameful and menacing disease, from

whose spiteful and exhausting eloquence society must be

protected. (Chesler 75)

The examples of women being treated in such a way are present

throughout literary history, many times as “fictional” pieces

that suspiciously mirror the life or experiences of the female

author.  There have been two women writers in particular who have

voiced their opinions on the insanity and the treatment of women

through almost autobiographical fiction.  Chronologically,

Charlotte Perkins Gilman came first.  The author of the short

story, “The Yellow Wallpaper,” Gilman created a first-person

account of a woman’s descent into madness and the way she is

treated by those around her throughout her ordeal.  Throughout

the story, the unnamed narrator is pitted against the main male

character, her husband John, over their differing viewpoints on

her condition and its treatment.  As did many in the

19th Century, John is of the opinion that isolation and

simplicity will help to cure his wife of her “nervousness.”  On

just the second page of the story, the narrator states:

            If … one’s own husband, assures friends and relatives

that there is really nothing the

            matter with one but temporary nervous depression – a

slight hysterical tendency – what   

            is one to do? … I take phosphates or phosphites –

whichever it is, and tonics, and

            journeys and air, and exercise, and am absolutely

forbidden to ‘work’ until I am well

            again. Personally, I disagree with their

ideas.  Personally, I believe that congenial work,

            with excitement and change, would do me good. (Gilman

10)

Although the narrator feels that she knows what is best for her,

she succumbs to the ideas of the male figure in her life out of a

sense of obligation and inferiority. 

            Sylvia Plath, writing The Bell Jar approximately sixty

years after Gilman created her unnamed narrator, brought the

treatment of depressed women and institutionalization to the

forefront with her vivid account of a young woman’s depression,

suicide attempt, and subsequent hospitalization at an

asylum.  Just like the woman in “The Yellow Wallpaper,” Plath’s

protagonist, Esther, is a strong, opinionated, talented and

creative woman who mostly has no choice but to submit to the

treatments that are offered to her.  On a number of occasions,

Esther is isolated from the people that she loves, either in an

actual hospital after her attempt at overdosing on pills, or in

an asylum. She spends most of the last quarter of the book in the

latter, hoping to cure herself and go back to being what she

considers to be the well-adjusted woman who existed before her

trip to New York. 

            The important point to note is that in both of these

texts, the women are silenced, isolated or “treated” by

men.  There has been a need throughout time for the patriarchal

cultures that these women lived in to silence and isolate

them.  If madwomen had a voice, a man’s culture would be

threatened by their intelligence.  A patriarchal culture is based

upon the idea that the man is in charge – the breadwinner, the

head of the household.  A woman who challenges this mentality is

refusing to conform to a patriarchal society’s standards of whom

she must be and therefore, in many instances, is considered mad.

Once a woman is considered mad, her voice exists to a man only to

upset the normal life that he has built and to challenge the idea

of the man being first.

 

The Opinions and/or Ambitions of the Madwoman

            In the quote on the previous page, it is quite

obvious that Gilman’s narrator has her own opinions about how she

should be treated.  “Personally,” she thinks that John’s ideas

are wrong.  This narrator begins the novel as a strong woman, one

who seems determined to get “better” and see her baby.  As the

narrator is all alone, with no one taking her side or asking for

her opinion, she is not allowed to write or to exercise her mind

in any way. Writing, in itself, seems to be a man’s job.  In

their book, The Madwoman in the Attic, Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar

state,

            Because they are by definition male activities …

writing, reading and thinking are

            not only alien but also inimical to ‘female’

characteristics … If male sexuality is

            integrally associated with the assertive presence of

literary power, female sexuality

            is associated with the absence of such power.

(Gilbert and Gubar  8)

Gilman’s narrator is dealing with an absence of this literary

power, not being allowed to write while she is being “cured” of

her condition.  Throughout the story, she makes references to the

fact that she must hide it when she is writing, for fear of what

her husband, the nanny or anyone else may think.  She also hides

the fact that she is seeing something, or someone, in the

wallpaper, lamenting, “I had no intention of telling him it

was because of the wallpaper – he would make fun of me.  He might

even want to take me away.”  (Gilman 28)  The fear of

incarceration has prompted this woman to keep her actions a

secret, letting them fester in her head until she almost becomes

the woman in the wallpaper, held in by bars.  Toward the end of

the story, she describes the woman that she sees, telling us,

            At night in any kind of light, in twilight,

candlelight, lamplight, and worst of all by

            moonlight,it [the wallpaper] becomes bars!  The

outside pattern I mean, and the woman

            behind it is as plain as can be.  (Gilman 26)

The narrator feels a certain sort of trepidation toward her

husband, who silences her and keeps her from performing the male

functions of reading and writing. The fact that she sees the

woman in the wallpaper behind bars just enforces the idea that

she is terrified of being locked away by her husband if his “rest

cure” fails to work.

 Plath’s Esther, on the other hand, finds that it is

actually her “sickness” that keeps her from writing, which is

what she would like to do as a career, instead of getting married

and having children.  As Esther starts losing more and more

sleep, her work begins to suffer and she even sees her

handwriting begin to decline.  Esther’s ambition places her in a

tough situation, as men mostly dominate the world of writing at

the time that she is growing up.  In becoming mad, Esther loses

her ability to perform the man’s roles of reading and writing and

ends up in an asylum, where she is least likely to be able to

feed her creative energies.

 

Conforming to the Female Role

            As previously noted, a man silences Gilman’s main

character.  Her husband John, also a physician, believes that she

should be isolated in their room, without contact with her baby,

and not allowed to work, or write, for the duration of the time

that she is there.  The problem with this is that, through her

journal entries, the reader begins to feel that perhaps the

isolation is making her crazier, and the story ends with the

narrator, obsessed with the “people” she thinks live under her

wallpaper, climbing over John’s limp body after he has fainted at

the sight of her.  John’s treatment of his wife seems close to a

treatment of S. Weir Mitchell’s, who actually treated Gilman

herself in 1887.  Mitchell came up with what was called the “rest

cure” and people all over the world applauded it. The “cure”

itself included the following “key elements”:

            …isolation, complete physical rest, a rich diet of

creamy foods, massage, and electrical

            stimulation of disused muscles, and complete

submission to the authority of the

            attending physician.  All physical and intellectual

activity was prohibited.  A patient was

            lifted out of her own social and familial milieu and

transported to a neutral environment

            tended only by a nurse and her doctor.

(Thrailkill  7)

The basic idea here is that a woman can become so burdened by

housework and the raising of children, that when her nerves

become stressed and/or she shows signs of hysteria, the only

possible treatment is to shut her away from the very things that

have made her “nervous” in the first place, thus enforcing the

theory that the man isolates the woman in the hopes of making her

“normal” again. Taking away the narrator’s right to create is

forcing her to conform to who John would like her to be – a quiet

woman in the room with the yellow wallpaper, easily swayed and

conveniently isolated.  In this way, the narrator is being forced

to give up her ambitions by a patriarchal society and marriage

where the man dominates and the woman listens.

            Esther is an interesting character in that she does

not conform to her society’s ideas of how a woman must live her

life in order to be considered “normal.”  Unfortunately,

Christina Rivera-Garza noticed a very important point when

studying institutions from as early as the 1910s.  She states in

her article that “General Asylum psychiatrists working during the

early 1910s detected symptoms of moral insanity in women who

failed to conform to the models of female domesticity” (Rivera-

Garza 657). In other words, when a woman decides not to conform

to the normal female roles that a patriarchal society expects,

she is considered mad and morally insane.  Esther, with her dream

of becoming a distinguished writer, doesn’t stand a chance.

 There are two important sides to Esther.  She is torn

between doing what a patriarchal society expects her to do, which

is to get married and raise a family, keeping her pureness in

tact in the years leading up to such events. But the independent

side of Esther wants to have a career as a writer, and although

she repeatedly states that she “never wanted to get married.  The

last thing I wanted was infinite security and to be the place an

arrow shoots off from” (Plath, 82), Esther also worries a great

deal about “pureness” and what is expected of her as a woman,

even stating, “When I was nineteen, pureness was the great issue”

(82).  As a result of the fact that Esther is torn between two

identities – what is expected of her and what she actually wants

– she is oppressed by society around her and is seemingly

punished for not conforming to the normal female role of wife and

mother, by being isolated from the world that she knows and being

forced to succumb to electric shock therapy.

 The men around Esther view her independence as a threat and

perhaps as one of the reasons that she has gone mad in the first

place.  It seems to be implied that if she had just found a good

man and gotten married, her worries about such “unimportant”

things as writing and a career would not have driven her to a

suicide attempt. The silencing of Esther begins, first and

foremost, with Dr. Gordon.

Dr. Gordon is a character that deftly represents the

patriarchal pressures placed upon Esther.  She has distrust for

Dr. Gordon from the very beginning of their doctor-patient

relationship.  She says that she “hated him” the minute she

“walked in through the door.”  (128) Dr. Gordon is a character

that holds Esther back, treating her like a child, even asking

her to send her mother in to his office after their second

session to suggest electric shock therapy, instead of bringing up

the subject to Esther during their appointment.  He fails to

nurture her and relies on machines to make her better, instead of

communicating with her about her fears and feelings.  As soon as

Dr. Gordon asks to speak to Esther’s mother (a conversation that

we find out later is about his notion of electric shock therapy

being the best thing for Esther), Esther says, “I didn’t like the

idea of Doctor Gordon talking to my mother one bit.  I thought he

might tell her I should be locked up” (Plath 135).  Again, the

reader is faced with the woman’s fear of isolation and silencing

at the hands of a man. 

Dr. Gordon wants Esther to forget her pain through shock

treatments instead of easing or understanding it by herself.  The

dialogue between Esther and Dr. Gordon is sparse and does not

seem to help Esther in any way, but even though the reader would

think that he doesn’t know that much about Esther or how she is

feeling, he suggests the electric shock therapy – quickly and

rashly, almost as if it is the answer for everything that could

be wrong with her.  Esther tells him that she is not sleeping,

not eating and not reading, silently hating him for the happy

family photograph that is sitting on his desk.  Esther’s behavior

is exactly the slight behavior that is exhibited by women who are

seemingly “punished” for their behavior.  In her book, Women and

Madness, Phyllis Chesler addresses this problem:

… the real oppression of women--which leads to real distress

and unhappiness; the conditioned female role of help-seeking

and distress reporting--which naturally leads to patient

"careers" as well as overt or subtle punishment for such

devalued behavior; the double or masculine standard of

mental health used by most clinicians--which leads to

perceiving the distressed (or any) female as "sick," whether

she accepts or rejects crucial aspects of the female role.

(Chesler 148)

As she is not conforming to the normal female roles of simply

sleeping, getting married and having children, Esther is punished

with the electric shock treatments that she dreads from there on

out, until she meets Dr. Nolan.

 Dr. Nolan is a female doctor who is very honest and upfront

with Esther.  The differences between Esther’s treatment by Dr.

Gordon and by Dr. Nolan can be staggering.  Through Dr. Nolan,

Esther receives the same kind of treatment that Dr. Gordon

inflicted on her, but instead of having such a horrible

experience, she finds that Dr. Gordon had the procedure performed

incorrectly.  Dr. Nolan informs her, “If it’s done properly, it’s

like going to sleep”  (Plath 189).  When Esther’s doctor is

female, the shock treatments are calm and peaceful, but when her

doctor is male, they are horrid and painful. Plath is telling us

that treatment for madness in women is like punishment when

administered by a man, but can actually help a woman to grow and

recover when given by a female. Dr. Gordon and his treatment

silence Esther, as she doesn’t want to share her feelings anymore

for fear of it happening again.

 

Madwoman as Monster: Man’s Need to Make the Madwoman Ugly

 

            The idea of the madwoman as a monstrous form is one

that is discussed in detail in The Madwoman in the Attic.  In a

sense, the woman who has lost control of her senses, to a man or

to the patriarchal society in which she has been raised, is

naturally flawed, and is unable to get a good grasp on the life

that has been laid out before her – the life of marriage and

domesticity.   

            In a sense, the women in both The Bell Jar and “The

Yellow Wallpaper” transform into what the men in their lives

would consider monstrous forms.  Throughout literary history, the

idea of a woman as a monster has graced the pages of many

works.  This idea is perhaps best explained by saying that the

perception of female characters as monsters vilifies women and

exemplifies the man’s fear of woman.  “Male dread of women, and

specifically the infantile dread of maternal autonomy, has

historically objectified itself in the vilification of women…”

(Gilbert and Gubar 34).  It seems that these monstrous women are

not able to be trusted with their own health and/or well being,

in the minds of their male counterparts.  For example, Bertha,

the madwoman in Bronte’s Jane Eyre, is kept a secret, locked away

in the attic.  At one time a supposedly beautiful woman, Bertha

is reduced to almost non-existence by Rochester, who most likely

assumes that her isolation is for his own good as well as

hers.  One has to wonder if his motives are truly selfish or just

those of a man who has grown up to believe that a woman should be

aesthetically pleasing to the eye.  By feeding into a fear of

spending his lifetime with a monster such as Bertha, who “is

mad,” with her “shaggy locks” and “bloated features” (Bronte 439,

441), Rochester allows himself to silence his wife and isolate

her, with only Grace Poole as her companion and caregiver.  This

image of the monstrous woman is very close to that of the

narrator in “The Yellow Wallpaper.”

            At the beginning of the story, the unnamed narrator

of Gilman’s text seems to be a normal woman who disagrees with

her husband’s diagnosis of her “nervousness” and the rest

treatment that he prescribes.  As the story moves on, though, she

becomes more and more agitated and grows to hate the room that he

has placed her in with the yellow wallpaper, of which she says,

“The color is hideous enough, and unreliable enough, and

infuriating enough, but the pattern is torturing”  (Gilman 25).

The narrator’s transformation into a monstrous, insane woman

happens gradually, as she becomes more and more obsessed with the

people she thinks are “creeping” behind her wallpaper.  At the

end of the story, the reader gets a chance to see just how

monstrous John thinks his wife has become, when the narrator

asks, “Now why should that man have fainted?  But he did, right

across my path by the wall, so that I had to creep over him every

time!” (Gilman 36).  As John has fainted at the sight of his

transformed wife, the reader becomes witness to the monstrous

image that has taken hold of her as a result of her silencing and

the fact that she feels too inferior to tell John of her

misgivings about her treatment. 

            Then there is the question of why the narrator

chooses yellow.  Not only does the color upset and aggravate her,

but it is in stark contrast to the lush, green gardens and

“velvet meadows” (Gilman 18) that surround the colonial estate in

which she is being kept.  In her article, “Managing Madness in

Gilman’s ‘The Yellow Wallpaper,’ Beverly Hume addresses this

question:

            Why does this narrator choose ‘yellow’ instead of

‘green’?  Although some critics have

            suggested that the narrator’s response is the only

sane one possible in the domestic

            and medical nightmare she describes, Gilman may also

have wanted to illustrate a final

            and fatal error made by her ‘wise’ narrator, who

does, after all, consciously choose the

            artificial daylight and domestic world of the yellow

wallpaper over that of the green

            garden outside. This yellow world is one in which a

‘woman’ can only become

            imprisoned, unable to recognize her rage, and unable

to move (or barely creep) beyond

            her delusions. Transforming into this woman, the

narrator becomes as monstrous,

            frightening, and unpredictable as she imagines the

yellow wallpaper to be. (Hume 3)

This point of view gives reason to the idea that the wallpaper is

what has made the narrator into a monster.  In choosing to mull

over the yellow wallpaper instead of the lush greenery outside,

the narrator is allowing herself to be stuck in her prison,

inside the room with the wallpaper.  The wallpaper looks ugly,

smells sour, and apparently, the yellow rubs off onto the married

couple’s clothes, but still it is what the narrator chooses to

focus on in her personal asylum.  In concentrating so much on the

wallpaper and its “inhabitants,” the narrator becomes as ugly and

monstrous as the paper itself, allowing John and his idea of rest

as a cure to conquer her sense and logic.

At one point in The Bell Jar, Esther becomes monstrous as well,

before she is put into isolation at an asylum, when her physical

appearance changes from that of a normal young woman to the

unrecognizable face she encounters in a mirror after her suicide

attempt.  Esther definitely has some issues with self-image, as

most of her worries throughout The Bell Jar have something to do

with the way others look at her.  She worries about whether or

not she should stay a virgin, she always mentions what she is

wearing or how a lack of sleep is affecting her appearance, and

when she wakes up after her suicide attempt and looks in the

mirror, she breaks it after seeing what she looks like:

            At first I didn’t see what the trouble was.  It

wasn’t a mirror at all, but a picture.  You

            couldn’t tell whether the person in the picture was a

man or a woman, because their hair

            was shaved off and sprouted in bristly chicken-

feather tufts all over their head.  One side

            of the person’s face was purple, and bulged out in a

shapeless way, shading to green   

            along the edges, and then to a sallow yellow.  The

person’s mouth was pale brown, with

            a rose-colored sore at either corner.  The most

startling thing about the face was its

            supernatural conglomeration of bright colors.  I

smiled.  The mouth in the mirror cracked

            into a grin.  A minute after the crash another nurse

ran in … Anybody could drop a

            mirror.  I didn’t see why they should get so stirred

up.  (Plath 174-75)

One can infer quite a few things from this passage, the most

significant being that it could be that Esther doesn’t in fact,

drop the mirror, but actually breaks it in a fit of hysterical

rage that could be attributed to the state of mind that she is in

after her suicide attempt and isn’t cognizant enough to remember

doing so.  The image of Esther as a monster is even more defined

by the use of words such as “supernatural” and “sallow

yellow.”   Being preoccupied with her appearance to others has

affected Esther since even the very beginning of the novel when

she is in New York, worrying about how she fits in with the other

girls, who are “yawning and painting their nails and trying to

keep up their Bermuda tans” (Plath 4).  The shock of seeing her

horrid and now monstrous reflection in the mirror seems to drive

her to have a fit, allowing her nerves to get the best of her,

making her the perfect candidate for

institutionalization.  Esther is not only transformed into a

monster, but she also loses her identity as a woman when she

cannot distinguish whether or not the face in the mirror is

female.  By destroying her monstrous form in breaking the mirror,

Esther is making herself into even more of a monster, violent and

unaccepting of the changes that have occurred within her psyche

and also to her physical self.  Later, Esther becomes isolated

from the outside world, much like Bertha Mason and Gilman’s

narrator.  The isolation of the monstrous woman is an example of

a patriarchal society condemning and punishing the women because

of their hideous transformations.  In Esther’s case, it is after

her discovery of her appearance and the outburst with the mirror

that she becomes isolated in an asylum, which one can assume may

not have happened if she hadn’t thrown a fit at the sight of her

own reflection.

           

Childbirth, Virginity and the Domestication of Women

            Can the idea of childbirth drive a woman mad?  In the

case of Plath’s Esther, it just may have been one of the

contributing factors in her illness.  Esther is reluctant to fall

into the female role of becoming a domesticated housewife and

mother.  She often gets visibly upset about the fact that she

might someday be expected to marry Buddy Willard.  Throughout the

novel, Esther makes comments about her fear of becoming a mother

and of falling into the role that will keep her from pursuing a

career as a writer.  In having the dream of pursuing a career as

a writer in the first place, Esther is challenging the assumption

that women exist only to please and serve men. Esther is allowing

herself to treat the ideas of motherhood and domesticity as

choices in a society that often does not offer a choice.  She is

trying not to succumb to the social pressure to adjust and

conform, or be judged as psychotic. As Esther worries that she

cannot be both a poet and a mother, the stress of it all drives

her further into madness.  The expectations of women have made

Esther dread the idea of becoming a mother because she feels that

the larger life of being able to keep her career and have a

family at the same time is unattainable – she will have to choose

one or the other, and society expects her to choose the latter,

which is not the favorable choice in Esther’s opinion.  Toward

the end of the novel, Esther speaks with Dr. Nolan about these

fears. “How easy having babies seemed to women around me!  Why

was I so unmaternal and apart?  Why couldn’t I dream of devoting

myself to baby after fat puling baby … If I had to wait on a baby

all day, I would go mad” (Plath 222). Esther is afraid that there

is something wrong with her because she does not want to have

children and from a patriarchal society’s viewpoint, she is

absolutely right.  Her dreams of having a successful career are

not considered normal in the time in which Esther is coming into

womanhood.   These comments come at the same time that she is

waiting to be fitted for a diaphragm, finally deciding that she

does not need to conform to society’s ideas of what she should be

as a young woman in the early 1960s – a virgin girl with a

yearning to get married and raise a family.  In deciding to

pursue a purely sexual relationship with a stranger and to stop

seeing Buddy, she is taking what she feels is the first step

toward independence and relieving herself of the burden of her

virginity.  As Esther climbs onto the examination table in the

doctor’s office to be fitted for her diaphragm, she thinks to

herself,

            I am climbing to freedom, freedom from fear, freedom

from marrying the wrong person,

            like Buddy Willard, just because of sex, freedom from

the Florence Crittenden Homes

            where all the poor girls go who should have been

fitted out like me, because what they

            did, they would do anyway, regardless… (Plath 223)

                                                                  

                                          

 

Esther has decided not to be a pawn in a man’s world.  She

realizes that male ownership stems from childbirth and

family.  The birth of a child gives the man power over the woman,

forcing her to stay at home in domestic suffocation and take care

of the child and her husband.  By being fitted for a diaphragm,

Esther is ridding herself of the patriarchal ownership and

oppression that comes with motherhood, and also the virginity

that has weighed on her nerves for practically the entire novel,

becoming a free woman of her own accord.

In “The Yellow Wallpaper,” the narrator has already fallen

into the role of wife and mother, only to have it taken away when

John decides that she is contending with a bout of

“nervousness.”It is as if she is being punished for letting

herself get away from her responsibilities and delve into a world

where she is considered ill and unable to take care of her child,

but it also seems as though she does not really want to take on

her responsibilities as a mother.  As she is kept away from her

child longer, she becomes more detached from reality and less

able to distinguish between real life and the life moving around

on the inside of the yellow wallpaper in her room.  The life of

domesticity that she has seemingly been accustomed to thus far

has been taken away from her, and the effect that her isolation

has on her “unveils not only the ills of the rest cure treatment

and a repressive domestic culture … but also her hatred for a

domestic (and maternal) role she has no desire to assume.” (Hume

2)  In a sense, the narrator has chosen a life of “creeping” over

the promise of a reunion with her baby at the close of her

treatment and the curing of her condition, as a result of the

fact that the treatment does nothing but isolate her, which makes

her more unstable.

 

Institutionalization and Isolation   

As stated earlier, each main character – that of Gilman’s

tale and of Plath’s novel – is at some point kept away from the

actual workings of society and its day to day life as a result of

her sickness or state of mind. Keeping the madwoman locked away

has been a recurring theme throughout literary history, in many

reputable works. “By the end of the nineteenth and throughout the

twentieth centuries, the portraits of madness executed by both

psychiatrists and novelists were primarily of

women”  (Chesler  73).  For example, Gilbert and Gubar base the

name of their book, The Madwoman in the Attic, on the story of Bertha

Mason in Jane Eyre.  In Hebrew mythology, the first woman, Lilith,

is banished for her refusal to conform to what is expected of her

by a patriarchal society.  In “The Yellow Wallpaper,” the

narrator is kept in a room that she does not like in order to

make her rest and not work or take care of her child.  And in The

Bell Jar, Esther spends a good amount of time in one institution or

another after her suicide attempt.  It seems to be expected that

if the madwoman is put away long enough, she will emerge normal,

cured and without any underlying hysteria or depression, or

perhaps completely forgotten about, as in the case of Bertha. 

Given the custodial nature of asylums and the anti-female

biases of most clinicians, women who seek "help" or women

who have "symptoms" are actually being punished for their

conditioned and socially approved self-destructive behavior.

(Chesler  79)

Isolation is often used as a punishment of sorts, forcing the

women to think that if they can “get better,” they will be able

to resume their lives as they were before their incarceration and

be relieved of their “self-destructive behavior.”

            The asylum itself, according to Michel Foucault,

“must represent the great continuity of social morality”

(Foucault 257).  By placing these women in institutions, the

patriarchal society in which they exist is supposedly protecting

morality and the normality of life itself.  In putting all of the

madwomen in one place, “the asylum reduces differences, represses

vice, eliminates irregularities” (Foucault 258).  The idea of the

asylum is a segregation of sorts in that it is a place where

people who have allowed their sicknesses to get the best of them

receive treatment together and without those who are perceived as

normal by society’s standards.  The asylum can take different

forms, either as an actual mental institution or as a room where

someone is placed to overcome her sickness, like the narrator in

Gilman’s story. 

            Although the narrator of “The Yellow Wallpaper” is

not lumped together with other madwomen in an actual asylum, she

is isolated nonetheless, the hopes of her husband for rest to

cure her weighing heavily on her shoulders.  The room that the

narrator is placed in “is a room whose wallpaper reduces an

artistic and articulate woman to a beast, stripped entirely of

her sanity and humanity and left crawling on all fours in

circuits … about the room”  (Bak 1).  The idea of the isolation

of the madwoman is where the Foucauldian concept of Panopticism

comes into play.  The paranoia that can result from constant

supervision affects the narrator as the story and her illness

progresses.  As her condition gets worse, she begins to think

more and more that she needs to hide her behavior from John, for

fear of being locked away.  She tells the reader, “I always lock

the door when I creep by daylight.  I can’t do it at night, for I

know John would suspect something at once” (Gilman 31). She does

not want John to find out that she sees someone in the wallpaper

for fear of being judged and watched even more closely, or

perhaps being put in an asylum with all of the other women

suffering from her nervous disorder.  In an article that he has

written on the concept of Panopticism in “The Yellow Wallpaper,”

John S. Bak explores the idea of surveillance and paranoia.  He

asserts that by the end of the story, the narrator has become a

“paranoid schizophrenic,” (Bak 4) and that,

            In believing that she has finally broken free of this

internal prison – the Victorian mindset

            her patriarchal society has instilled in her – she

has essentially released herself from the

            external bars and rings that John (or all nineteenth

century men, for that matter) uses to

            restrain her. (Bak 4)

The idea here is that the institutionalization and constant

observation of the narrator have caused her not only to progress

to a much more severe condition than she started out with, but to

fear and distrust her husband and the patriarchal values for

which he stands.

            In The Bell Jar, Esther is not just placed into a room

by herself, but into two different asylums where she is

constantly looked after, judged and “treated” for her

depression.  The bell jar itself is a symbol of isolation.  The

idea of a bell jar – a glass vessel that is open at the bottom

and closed at the top like a bell, that is often used to hold in

important particles – is that something can be kept inside of it

successfully, and carefully observed. Because of her depression,

Esther feels that she is inside the bell jar, unable to connect

with the outside world, the society in which she has been brought

up, in any meaningful way except to offer an example of madness

to those around her. 

            Phyllis Chesler offers a discussion of asylums

in Women and Madness.  She calls the effect of men being treated

like women in institutions “debilitating” but never answers the

question she herself asks:  “What about the effect of being

treated like a woman when you are a woman?”  (Chesler 75).  As

women crowd asylums, many for not conforming to female roles of

domesticity, like Esther, it is often forgotten that the way that

mad people are treated as helpless human beings is exactly how

women have been treated throughout time.  Chesler also says that,

in these asylums,

Experimental or traditional medication, surgery, shock,

insulin coma treatment, isolation, physical and sexual

violence, medical neglect, and slave labor are routinely

enforced. Mental patients are somehow less "human" than

either medical patients or criminals. They are, after all,

"crazy"; they have been abandoned by (or have abandoned

dialogue with) their "own" families. As such, they have no

way--and no one--to "tell" what is happening to

them. (Chesler 75)

And so the focus is brought back to the most obvious point.  The

women that are placed in isolation seem to have given up on being

domesticated wives, mothers and pillars of society at some point

in time, and are therefore being punished for not conforming to

what is considered “normal” behavior for women.  The isolation

and hospitalization of these women are forms of silencing the

stronger, more opinionated and more stubborn women who refuse to

accept the rules of a patriarchal society.   Whereas isolation is

shown to the women in these literary works as a tactic that will

help to make them better and able to return to a more normal life

by society’s standards, they are actually being punished and shut

away to hide their abnormalities from the same society that

claims to want to help them.

 

Conclusion

            The “madwomen” of literature have been treated as

inferior creatures to their male counterparts throughout literary

history.  Plath’s Esther spends so much of her time worrying

about these men, the same men that have silenced her and

subjected her to treatments that may have even worsened her

condition, that it takes her actually putting herself first and

removing the men from the equation for her to leave her isolation

and return to society. Esther’s self-image and incessant concerns

about virginity, marriage and childbirth lend to the “sickness”

that worsens and then gets better throughout the novel.  Gilman’s

narrator is also silenced by a male influence and shut away from

society, leaving her to wonder what others will think of her when

they learn of the thoughts and ideas that manifest themselves in

her mind as she is kept away in her yellow prison.  Each woman’s

condition is made worse by the supposed treatment that she is

receiving from the various people in her life. 

            The patriarchal silencing of women throughout the

history of literature has lent to many feminist theories treating

the subject as an injustice to women and proof of the fact that

the male influences in their lives help to make them mad in the

first place. It becomes necessary for the madwoman to be silenced

so that the lives and values of men can be preserved.

In Women and Madness, Phyllis Chesler puts all of this in

perspective with examples from real life.  She lists the names of

four women: Elizabeth Packard, Ellen West, Zelda Fitzgerald and

Sylvia Plath, and then states:

During the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, these four

women were hospitalized for various psychiatric "symptoms."

All were uncommonly stubborn, talented, and aggressive. Some

became socially withdrawn: they no longer cared how they

"looked," they refused to eat, they became sexually

disinterested in their husbands. One woman "heard" things.

Two others repeatedly attempted to kill themselves. Ellen

West and Sylvia Plath finally committed suicide when they

were in their early thirties. (Chesler 45)

These symptoms seem impressively similar to the symptoms seen in

Esther and in Gilman’s narrator.  If this is what has happened in

reality, how far away can these texts be away from the

truth?  Both The Bell Jar and “The Yellow Wallpaper” can be observed

as semi-autobiographical texts that almost warn the reader about

the treatment of women who are considered mad, abnormal or

nervous.  Each writer is, in many ways, offering her opinion of

the treatment of these women through the craft of writing,

effectively showing the reader that it very much matters whether

one is male or female in the world of psychiatric evaluation and

treatment.  And perhaps when the madwoman is no longer silenced,

the world will actually see that she was never mad in the first

place, just creative and independent in a world of patriarchy and

oppression.

 

 

 

Works Cited

 

Bak, John S.  “Escaping the jaundiced eye: Foucauldian

Panopticism in Charlotte Perkins

            Gilman’s "The Yellow Wallpaper.’”  Studies in Short Fiction.

31.1(1994) 39.

Bronte, Charlotte.  Jane Eyre.  1847.  New York:  Random House,

2000.  Modern Library

            Paperback Edition.

Chesler, Phyllis.  Women and Madness.  New York:  Four Walls Eight

Windows, 1997.

Foucault, Michel.  Madness and Civilization:  A History of Insanity in the Age of

Reason.  New

            York:  Random House, 1965.

Gilbert, Sandra, and Susan Gubar.  The Madwoman in the Attic:  The

Woman Writer and the

Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination.  1979. Connecticut: Yale

University, 2000. Second Edition. 

Gilman, Charlotte Perkins.  The Yellow Wallpaper.  1892.  New

York:  The Feminist Press, 1996. Revised edition. 

Hume, Beverly.  “Managing Madness in Gilman’s ‘The Yellow

Wallpaper.’”  Studies in American Fiction.    30(2002).

Plath, Sylvia.  The Bell Jar.  New York: Harper & Row, 1971.

Rivera-Garza, Cristina.  “She Neither Respected Nor Obeyed

Anyone.”  Hispanic American

            Historical Review.  81.3-4 (2001) 653-688. 

Thrailkill, Jane F.  “Doctoring ‘The Yellow Wallpaper.’”  John

Hopkins University Press.  ELH  69.2(2002) 525-566.