Salah Alsafarjlani explores the role of women within the sectors of medicine, marriage, and empowerment through the lens of 19th century literature featuring a feminist stance.
Salah Alsafarjlani
Introduction
Women’s place within society and their role in their household has been a controversial and a frequent topic. In the 19th century, women faced numerous struggles within a patriarchal society and the medical institution.
They could not vote, own property, or even control their own bodies. Their decisions to accept or decline treatments were completely non-existent because of the nature of the patriarchal society leaving them at the mercy of their often misguided husbands.
Kate Chopin’s The Story Of An Hour and Charlotte Gilman’s The Yellow Wallpaper challenge the traditional ideas of a woman’s role in marriage, as well as the diagnosis and treatment of women in medical spaces. In both stories, we follow the daily lives of women in the late 19th century as they try to deal with their issues, ranging from death to postpartum depression, while attempting to conform to society's expectations. This is seen in both stories as the protagonists struggle to deal with illnesses in a patriarchal society, a struggle that is magnified by the continuous dismissal of emotions by the male figures. It’s worth noting that the stories do not specify the illnesses the women dealt with. It is not clear whether Mrs. Mallard’s “heart condition” is real or imagined, and similarly, John’s wife is not specifically diagnosed with a medical condition, but she is described as suffering from a mental health issue.
It is in both stories that the women feel unheard by both the medical institution and their husbands, and only realize the value of freedom after going through extreme events involving death and sanity. In The Story of an Hour, Louise gains independence and autonomy after her husband's death, challenging the idea that men should have complete control over women. In “The Yellow Wallpaper”, the protagonist's husband dismisses her concerns about her own health, demonstrating the dangers of male authority.
In “The Yellow Wallpaper”, John’s wife is shown to be helpless against the husband's diagnosis, even though she points out she would have been better off without it (Gilman 49). This helplessness is magnified and caused by several societal factors, including the institution of marriage at that time, and her status as a woman under the patriarchy. Her husband was not a bad husband for his time, nor a bad doctor, but rather thought of himself as a very loving ordinary man. John’s wife is also from the upper class, as she gets to spend her summer in a colonial mansion. (49) This shows the reader that the problems John’s wife went through were ones that predominantly upper-class women experienced, as they had no actual responsibilities during marriage. This was a contrast from lower class women, whose matter of providing for their families was a more prominent struggle than the inequality of the marriage institution.
Kate Chopin’s “The Story Of An Hour” sees a similar theme, as Mrs. Mallard described her marriage as an ordinary, loving marriage. Mr. Mallard was also seen as a good husband for his time because he did all that qualified him for that title: he provided for his wife and even cared for her (Hicks 2). At times, Mrs. Mallard would feel that her husband was nice to her; she loved him “sometimes” and thought that he had “kind tender hands” (Chopin 32). Mr. Mallard is not shown as a bad person throughout the start of the story, as the people surrounding Mrs. Mallard would praise her husband as a great man for what he did for her. Mrs. Mallard might have thought that she was happy occasionally as she did not know what choice of lifestyle she had other than to be married.
Gilman starts the story by letting John’s wife tell the readers about herself and her condition as described by her husband, a “temporary nervous depression” (49) as we figure out that her husband has prescribed her the rest cure and to take phosphates, confining her to a room with no contact to the outside world and no visitors. John leaves her to suffer through this treatment because of his misjudgment, and that, in her eyes, is the reason why she does not get better. With no outlet other than writing in her secret diary, her desire to be heard is defeated as she does not fight back against her husband’s orders. To her, it’s almost trivial to obey her husband, even though she knew he was wrong.
This is also the case in “The Story Of an Hour”, where Mrs. Mallard does not question the doctor’s diagnosis or her treatment by the people surrounding her until it’s too late. Her first reaction to hearing about her husband’s death is to isolate herself, knowing well that Mr. Mallard’s death is going to change every aspect of her life. She refused to listen to her sister and didn’t open the door revealing that what she was going through was very serious; A thing that perhaps people surrounding her wouldn’t understand. At the beginning of “The Story Of An Hour”, we are told that Mrs. Mallard has to be treated with special care at the news of her husband’s death, alluding to the medical treatment of women in the late 19th century. Doctors often treated women as if they were more delicate than men, and they even refused to listen to their experiences denouncing them as overly emotional. Those facts make us question the very first premise from the start, of Mrs. Mallard having heart trouble (30), as she could very well have been misdiagnosed. Society has treated Mrs. Mallard in a lesser way just because of her gender. Her struggles have been dismissed and degraded into the so-called “Heart trouble”.
Similarly, John’s complete disregard for his wife’s emotion only ends up causing his wife to feel worse, as the critic describes: “His wife is his child, and she doesn't know even the simplest things about what ails her. His use of diminutive names for her ("blessed little goose," "little girl") parallels his unresponsive replies: listening to her is the last thing on his agenda.” (Martin 1). John thought he was taking care of his wife by not listening to her, he thought he knew better because, in his mind, he had complete authority and control over his wife by virtue of his status as her husband and her doctor. Doctors deem female patients as overreacting or psychotic. Having a prestigious physician for a husband and brother didn't help John’s wife or Mrs Mallard. Instead, the women’s closeness to them may have pushed them farther from reason and caused them to dismiss her condition. “Essentially, it is a story of female confinement and escape. Gilman's narrator is trapped in the home, in her maternal body, and in the text she has created” (Korb 2) Instead of diagnosing her correctly with postpartum depression, they thought she needed the rest cure. Dr. Mitchell ordered the same therapy for John's wife as he had for the author, Charlotte Gilman, since they both had the same “illness”. John decided it would be better to keep her apart from all she knew in the cruel conditions of the rest cure.
When Mrs. Mallard learns her husband has died, she experiences an emotional rollercoaster that ends up with her realizing that she was now free of an arrangement, one that was controlling her life, as it’s described: “There will be no powerful will bending hers in that blind persistence with which women and men believe they have a right to impose a private will upon a fellow creature” (Chopin 31). The narrator leaves the readers to decipher those complex emotions as they go through Mrs. Mallard’s mind, and as those emotions approach joy and freedom, we are left to question if Mrs. Mallard’s joy is cruel or justified (Berkove 3). It is when the story describes Mrs. Mallard's emotions that the story has seen the most controversial critical opinions, from those invalidating Mrs. Mallard’s experience as selfish and self-assertion and selfishness (Berkove 2) to those blaming her husband for his failures.
As the plot progressed in “The Yellow Wallpaper", we were shown the thoughts of John’s wife using her interpretation and narration of her experiences. One thing that stood out is her description of the wallpaper, which gradually deteriorates and thus represents her mental state. As the protagonist of the story suffered through the rest cure and confinement by her husband, she accompanies the readers through the multiple stages of deterioration of her mental state. “Behind that outside pattern the dim shapes get clearer every day” (56). Her description of her surroundings seems to become worryingly more detached from reality, as her mind tries to occupy itself against the brutal conditions of the rest cure. This is best seen by the narrator’s description of the wallpaper, as it goes from being a curse “I never saw a worse paper in my life” (51) to a blissful escape “I’m feeling ever so much better! I don’t sleep much at night, for it is so interesting to watch developments” (59).
And similarly, Mrs. Mallard used her surroundings to cope with the news of her husband’s death, “She could see in the open square before her house the tops of trees that were all aquiver with the new spring life” (30) after that, Mrs. Mallard failed to cope and the plot reached a climax “She clasped her sister’s waist and together they descended the stairs'' (32). The women saw obedience as a way to conform to society and the social norms; It was to them a prison in which they must break free. Mrs. Mallard fails to contain her emotions by locking herself in a room, and John’s wife finds it easier to comply with her husband’s orders rather than argue, which ends up in her becoming psychotic. Mrs. Mallard was overwhelmed with joy at her new freedom “‘Free! Body and soul free!’ she kept whispering” (Chopin 34). It was something so foreign and ecstatic, especially to a woman during her time. The freedom she was given was perhaps what led to her demise, as the critic Mark Cunningham states: “the story portrays the position of women in late nineteenth-century American society as so bleak that the attempt to break from the life-denying limitations of patriarchal society is itself self-destructive” (1). Mrs. Mallard did not know the consequences her freedom entailed or how it was dangerous to her. It was an afterthought of what had unfolded, the euphoric realization that she had the absolute freedom to do what she pleased. “It was only yesterday she had thought with a shudder that life might be so long.” (Chopin 32).
Chopin describes Mr. Mallard to be an ordinary husband of his time. This leads us to think of her intention to portray the story in a more common way that shows us that Mrs. Mallard is not alone in her struggle against the institution of marriage and that Mr. Mallard was not necessarily aware that he was being cruel to her, but he was imposed into the same societal prison as his wife. Make no mistake, men have not been spared from the negativity of such fixed arrangements. Chopin has carefully designed the plot and the setting of the story to tackle the specific issue of gender inequality. Both genders are victims of this gender stereotyping, with women especially suffering. The story’s ending is ironic in the sense that the doctors did not know the true reason for her death. “When the doctors came they said she had died of heart disease—of joy that kills” (Chopin 32). Although Chopin left us with a clinical diagnosis of Mrs. Mallard that might seem out of place, she wanted us to know that hope and joy weren’t the things that killed her. It was society’s denial of a woman’s essential right to have a choice. Perhaps Louise would have lived her best life without a husband or at least one who denied her a voice.
In “The Yellow Wallpaper”, John’s wife was discouraged from practicing any degree of self-autonomy, even writing. What is more concerning is that the narrator of the story had been misdiagnosed by both her husband, John, and her brother, leaving her no escape from the cruelty of the medical institution. They might not have misdiagnosed her with ill intention, as both of them thought it would be the better thing for her to be put through the rest cure, but that the medical institution was so disconnected from what women need that men freely practiced cruel and experimental treatments on them. John’s wife had lived on at the end of “The Yellow Wallpaper”, seemingly free of her husband and society. She found the same sort of freedom that Louise found when she thought her husband had died: cruel freedom. This freedom cost Mrs. Mallard to suffer the tragic end of her life “By the death of Louise at the end of the story, Chopin clearly implies that any woman's search for ideal feminine selfhood in a hostile environment of a patriarchal society is extremely difficult” (Wang 1) Mrs. Mallard had died to gain her autonomy, while John’s wife lost her sanity to gain her autonomy.
Although John might have noticed that his wife was not getting better from the rest cure, he did not want to listen to her because that would mean admitting that he is wrong. John laughs and jokes with her instead of treating any of her suffering with any urgency. That tells us a lot about John’s character because it shows us that he is willing to dismiss his wife’s opinion to avoid hurting his ego as a physician and as a husband. It would be too much for him to admit that he was wrong, because that would mean that women, specifically his wife, were as capable if not more capable than him, both as a husband and as a physician. And indeed, Gilman describes the purpose of her text as preventing women from suffering the same fate as her own experiences, and the one portrayed in the story by John’s wife “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” (Gilman 33). She reaches a sense of justice by saving those women from something she went through herself “I went home and obeyed those directions [rest cure] for some three months, and came so near the borderline of utter mental ruin that I could see over” (32). Intentionally or not, Gilman’s text contained a much more radical idea. It showed everyone around her how oppressive those institutions are, and the extent to which women’s voices are silenced in medicine.
Kate Chopin’s writing was also very feminist simply because her protagonist did not fit into the typical obedient and happy wife trope of her time. Mrs. Mallard’s joy was something way more rebellious than it was made out to be, as she embodies the will of women to be free from the shackles of the patriarchy. At the end of the story, she was better off in a way than in the beginning, as she was no longer under the control of her husband and his way of life. This can also be said for John’s wife; since she lost her sanity, she was no longer under her husband’s will nor would she reply to his demands, as she would not be able to understand them anymore. Her husband is shocked by her behavior and loses consciousness after he sees her jumping around the room after tearing the wallpaper down.
Even if Mrs. Mallard had survived the initial news of hearing about her husband’s death; what she faced was a life of obedience and dull marriage. She simply could not come back to this arrangement, not after she had complete freedom after she thought her husband had died. Mrs. Mallard’s sickness is not physical, as the doctors thought. She is “an idealistic innocent woman having a heart trouble physically and symbolically” (Wang 3).
Both of the authors faced significant challenges before getting these works published. Gilman was told by publishers that it is a disgrace to portray the protagonist of The Yellow Wallpaper as an insane person. But perhaps it is the story’s attack on social norms (Hedges 34) and the male omniscience over females in medicine, which challenges the patriarchal structure of society and what it means to be a good husband. This attack is seen as very dangerous to the values of early patriarchal society, as it showed women the freedom their society took away from them.
Critic Emily Toth argues that Chopin had no choice but to let Mrs. Mallard die in order to get her story published. Chopin “had to disguise reality. She had to have her heroine die. A story in which an unhappy wife is suddenly widowed, becomes rich, and lives happily ever after . . . would have been much too radical, far too threatening in the 1890s. There were limits to what editors would publish, and what audiences would accept” (Toth 10).
Chopin was aware that her text was ahead of its time and still chose to publish it, knowing the public outcry it would cause. The story showed how much of a progressive thinker Chopin really was, and why she would be rejected by publishers of her time. “The reason why editors turned a number of her stories was very likely that her women became passionate and emancipated” (Hicks 3). It was too dangerous to these male publishers to think a married woman might be better off if her husband was dead. Perhaps it is with this mindset that we should approach the complex reality around us, Chopin’s words show us a simple reality of people like John’s wife and Mrs. Mallard: Traditional gender roles and the male dominant view of medicine ruin women's lives and take away their freedom.
References
1. Berkove, Lawrence L “Fatal Self-Assertion in Kate Chopin’s ‘The Story Of An Hour’” Class Pack, English 16, Spring (2022)
2. Chopin, Kate “The Story Of An Hour” Class Pack, English 16, Spring 2022: 30-32 Korb, Rena “An Overview Of ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’” Class Pack, English 16, Spring (2022): 2
3. Cunningham, Mark “The Autonomous Female Self and the Death of Louise Mallard in Kate Chopin's 'Story of an Hour.'” Class Pack, English 16, Spring (2022): 1
4. Gilman, Charlotte Perkins “The Yellow Wallpaper” Class Pack, English 16, Spring (2022):
30-34
5. Gilman, Charlotte Perkins “Why I Wrote The Yellow Wallpaper” Class Pack, English 16, Spring (2022): 32-33
6. Hedges, Elaine R “Scuddler’s Comment On ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’” Class Pack, English 16, Spring (2022): 34
7. Hicks, Jennifer “An Overview Of ‘The Story of An Hour’” Class Pack, English 16, Spring (2022): 1-2
Toth, Emily “Unveiling Kate Chopin” The University Of Mississippi, (1999): 10
8. Martin, Linda Wagner “The Yellow Wallpaper: Overview” Class Pack, English 16, Spring
(2022): 1
9. Wang, Xu-Ding “Feminine Self Assertion in ‘The Story Of An Hour’” DOI Airiti Library, (2007): 1-3
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