Today I finally read "The Yellow Wallpaper" by Charlotte Perkins Gilman.
I have been aware of this book for a while and am well aware
of the plot and its feminist overtones, with Gilman making statements on the
wrongs of women only being "true women" when fulfilling a role of
mother and housewife and the horrible methods with dealing with mental illness
or the "fragility" of women of the time. However, after reading
"The Yellow Wallpaper", I am struck by the truly horrible plight of
the our poor narrator and how she documents her spiral into madness. Her sad story made all the more poignant by
the fact that she has no name...... this story could be anyone's. I am left
wondering how far we have actually come in the treatment of mental illness in
the 120 odd years since the publication of this book.
People with a mental illness are still treated with disdain,
and called weak willed when they can't just "smile and get over it."
Its like smiling and getting over a broken leg, can't be done with will power
alone. People have to struggle and suffer through years of the wrong prescriptions
with no guarantee that they will ever get the right ones. They may not be able to work enough or at all
the support themselves or even dependants because of the reality of their illness.
I honestly don’t think we have come very far from this truly haunting tale.
The gut wrenching final scene of this story, I think will
stalk my dreams for a long time. Where our
narrator, in her delirium, believed that she had in fact freed herself from the
ghastly yellow wallpaper by ripping as much as she could reach off the walls
and then continues to creep around the walls, following the smudge, crawling
over her husband’s body, celebrating her
freedom in her utter madness.
The Penelopiad by Margaret Atwood
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