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When S. Weir Mitchell diagnosed Charlotte Perkins Gilman (then Stetson) as suffering from a variation of "nervous prostration," or "neurasthenia," as outlined in his Fat and Blood (1877), he prescribed what many nineteenth-century physicians (including Freud) believed to be the necessary recuperative regimen--rest. Included in Mitchell's Rest Cure treatment were locking Gilman away in his Philadelphia sanitarium for a month, enforcing strict isolation, limiting intellectual stimulation to two hours a day, and forbidding her to touch pen, pencil, or paintbrush ever again.(1) Mitchell believed, Catherine Golden tells us, that both companionship and work proved a detriment to his patient's recovery, further taxing her nerves already frazzled from an admixture of hysteria and postpartum depression (Golden, "'Overwriting'..." 146). Gilman dramatized her experience with Dr. Mitchell in "The Yellow Wallpaper" (1892), a journalistic/clinical account of a woman's gradual descent into madness (or is she mad at the beginning and is pathologically reliving the descent that has already taken place) at the hands of her husband John, a doctor who subscribes to the Mitchell treatment.
Gilman's narrator is isolated "three miles from the village" (11) in an upstairs nursery of a "colonial mansion" (9), its windows barred and its walls covered in a faded yellow wallpaper whose "sprawling flamboyant patterns" commit "every artistic sin" (13) imaginable. It 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, or smooches, about the room. For this reason, feminist critic Elaine Hedges wrote in 1973 that the "paper symbolizes her situation as seen by the men who control her and hence her situation as seen by herself" (Afterword 51), a view echoed by later critics. "The Yellow Wallpaper," then, became a feminist text that indicted the men who were responsible for the narrator's physical confinement and subsequent mental demise.
But this is also a room not unlike that described by Michel Foucault in Discipline and Punish (1975), patterned after Jeremy Bentham's eighteenth-century Panopticon. Originally designed to replace the dark and dank "houses of security" so common throughout England with the bright and salubrious "house of certainty" (Foucault 202), the Panopticon developed into an unscrupulous method of inquisition that perpetuated fear and bred paranoia....