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I.
READING PATTERNS
She was emotional and ashamed of her tears, and honestly hated the whole matter of sickness. You will see such hysterical women. You will see others whose minds are like the back of a piece of needle-work with a baffling absence of pattern.
S. Weir Mitchell, Lectures on Diseases of the Nervous System
I will follow that pointless pattern to some sort of conclusion.
Charlotte Perkins oilman, "The Yellow Wallpaper"
DESPITE THE SHARED INTEREST in baffling and pointless patterns suggested in these epigraphs, few cultural figures from late nineteenth-century America seem more at odds than S. Weir Mitchell and Charlotte Perkins Gilman. Not only does the depressed narrator in oilman's "The Yellow Wallpaper" fear being sent to Mitchell for one of his cures should she not "pick up faster" while under the care of her physician-husband (18), Gilman herself directly criticized Mitchell's treatment: "the real purpose of the story was to reach Dr. S. Weir Mitchell, and convince him of the error of his ways" (Living 121).
Even a cursory look at his public life clearly indicates that Mitchell's "errors" extended beyond his medical practice. A staunch Victorian until his death in 1914, Mitchell spoke out against women's suffrage and advanced university training: "I believe that if the higher education or the college life in any way, body or mind, unfits women to be good wives and mothers there had better be none of it" ("Address" 5). Women, for Mitchell, were more than angels of the house, they embodied home itself:
Most folks think vaguely of home as meaning marriage, husband, wife, children; but for me, its foremost and most beautiful human necessity is a woman; and, indeed, this is of her finest nobleness, to be homeful for others, and to suggest by the honest sweetness of her nature, by her charity, and the hospitality of her opinion, such ideas of honor, truth, and friendliness as cluster, like porch roses around our best ideas of home. ("Address" 11)
Throughout her career, oilman challenged the images Mitchell celebrates here. Her fiction and her feminist treatises, Women and Economics (1898) and The Home: Its Work and Influence (1903), insist that as long as women are associated with a "sublime devotion" to home and mothering,...