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The Science of Art
Lane Morris Buckman
"The artist alone sees spirits. But after he has told of their appearing to him, everybody sees them."
-- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832),
“For many years I suffered from a severe and continuous nervous breakdown tending to melancholia--and beyond,” wrote Charlotte Perkins Gilman in a 1913 issue of The Forerunner as explanation of her book, The Yellow Wallpaper. She went on to detail her illness and the treatment prescribed.
Treatment for Gilman’s diagnosed neurasthenia was the Rest Treatment. It dictated that the patient retreat from life and society, avoid all but the most pertinent of company, and live with as little use of the intellect as possible. Art was out of the question, pens and paper verboten. The patient was to become still and quiet, and rest would sort out her troubled mind.
Gilman describes how when the rest treatment drove her even closer to the brink of insanity the intervention of a friend saved her life. Her friend suggested she reintroduce herself to society. Gilman returned to work, and in throwing herself into that work, she found a respite from her illness. Too much time in solitude had addled her, but usefulness allowed her to recover some power.
After having published her story, Gilman sent a copy to the physician whose treatment had caused her such distress. While he never acknowledged the work to her, years later she heard that her writing had inspired her physician to seek different courses of treatment for neurasthenia. Art had offered a lesson to Science.
The Yellow Wallpaper is considered an important feminist work for its historical value. The story of a young mother whose mental distress, possibly and probably brought on by a bout with postpartum depression, details precisely the role of women in the late 19th Century. Ruled and hardly recognized as being able to diagnose themselves, those women dealing with depression were thought only to be faint from the strain of having to think, and were coddled back away from any intellectual pursuits as a cure.
Weaker vessels, indeed. In Gilman’s story, her unnamed heroine is attended not only by her highly regarded physician, but by both her husband and brother, who are physicians as well. All of these men are convinced that she is putting on with her nerves, and each is convinced that with rest, restriction from society and time spent in a solitary room, she will recover herself.
As her condition deteriorates with treatment, rather than seeking other methods, she is further and further removed from life until there is no life left for her outside of the insane world she has created for herself.
Pride among her coven of physicians will not allow them to consider alternative treatments. Embarrassment among her family will not allow them to reintroduce her to society. Life lived in a box reduces her to the point that any life outside that box is exhausting to live. The treatment is its own disease.
Though Gilman’s diagnosis is one that is not in current vogue (use of the term neurasthenia disappeared at the beginning of the 20th Century), her situation, and that of her heroine seem very much alive today. Consider one Andrea Yates. A mother with known mental disparities, possibly and probably suffering from postpartum depression, whose treatment followed the prescribed course of popular science and whose life was regimented by male influence, often seeking to define her place as a weaker vessel intended for motherhood and that alone.
Misdirection by her husband and spiritual leaders, and misdiagnosis by her doctors led her down a path similar to Gilman’s unnamed heroine. Hallucinations, obsessions and hysteria grew in a full blown insanity.
Of course it is impossible to fully compare a little novel of one woman’s struggle with neurasthenia to another woman’s struggle which culminated in a most heinous crime, but similarities do exist. Were Yates to write a Roman a Clef as Gilman did, what result might it have on treatment of similar disorders?
Gilman stated, “The little book is valued by alienists and as a good specimen of one kind of literature. It has, to my knowledge, saved one woman from a similar fate--so terrifying her family that they let her out into normal activity and she recovered.”
Just a simple little book changed the course of treatment for at least one woman, and the course of treatment for every neurasthenic patient seen by what Gilman described as a “great physician.” A simple book, one simple work of art, made a change in the course of medical history.
As a novel, The Yellow Wallpaper stands up as a great piece of literature and a work of art. As a cautionary tale told by one in the know, it stands up as an instrument of change. Gilman saw spirits and revealed them to the world.
“[The Yellow Wallpaper]was not intended to drive people crazy,” Gilman said, “but to save people from being driven crazy, and it worked.”
Lane Morris Buckman studied English, Foreign Language and Classics
at the University of Texas at Arlington, where she received her
B.A. in 1995.
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