Some of the Most Undeveloped, Unsupported Ideas of the World Have Led To the Greatest Discoveries.
Some of the most undeveloped, unsupported ideas of the world have led to the greatest discoveries. One often develops a hypothesis based on some sort of "hunch" he or she experienced from observations, and that hunch can lead to a world-impacting discovery. Ben Franklin suspected that lightning was a powerful energy source, which was a foundation that later led to the discovery of electricity. Christopher Columbus began his adventure suspecting that the Earth was not flat, but rather was round. Such "hunches" were unconventional at the time, but were proven true. The origin of many brilliant ideas comes from research first sparked by imagination.
Author, Charlotte Perkins Gilman provides another example, where her brilliant medical expose suggests future breakthroughs. Her short story "The Yellow Wallpaper" sets clear the situation of depression argues against the treatment for the disease at her time and projects or forecasts the nature of schizophrenia before much was known about that mental disorder. Gilman wrote this remarkable short story in 1892, after battling a post-partum depression after the birth of her first child. This is not an uncommon experience for a mother following the birth of a child. The depression most typically occurs directly following the birth, but in some cases it can occur months later. There is thought to be two causes for this illness. One is that the cause is a psychological state change in the patient arising from new and overwhelming responsibilities, inadequate sleep, or insufficient support. The other is that the cause is a change in those hormones generated in the patient after birth. During pregnancy the mother is supplied with plentiful amounts of hormones including estrogen, endorphins, and thyroid hormones. A sudden deficiency of these hormones after the birth of the child is believed to result in a psychosis mental state (Leopold 2).
Post-partum depression has been around for all time, but not until the late 19th century was it recognized as a clinical disease. The first method to cure this disease was discovered by a doctor named Dr. S. Weir Mitchell. His method was called the "rest cure" which involved the women obeying total bed rest and no work. This method was prescribed to Gilman and she "obeyed those directions for some three months," noted Gilman, "and came so near the border line of utter mental ruin that I could see over"("Why I Wrote 'The Yellow Wallpaper'" 86). With some advice from her mother she began to work and write again, which eventually cured her (The Living of Charlotte Perkins Gilman 90).
Hence by following the intuition of her own experience, she was able to write the "Yellow Wallpaper." In this short story she elaborated on her illness and suggested what she thought would happen in later stages, if she were not to be cured. The woman in the story suffers from post-partum depression, and also experiences hallucinations. Although Gilman at no time in the course of being ill experienced hallucinations, she imagined that it could be possible for someone to experience hallucinations like the ones described in the story. Her assumption was correct and doctors now call the disorder with such hallucinations schizophrenia.
Schizophrenia is the most common form of severe mental illness. Millions of people world-wide suffer from it each year. This disease is "characterized by disruptions to the balance of chemical messengers and nerve pathways in the brain." (AstraZeneca, par. 2) People suffering from schizophrenia may view their environment abnormally and experience hallucinations. The reasons for development of schizophrenia are not yet known, but scientists and doctors have come up with possible causes. Many studies suggest that it can be genetically transmitted. Doctors seek to examine family members of patients with schizophrenia, because statistically one has a greater chance ...
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Schizophrenia is the most common form of severe mental illness. Millions of people world-wide suffer from it each year. This disease is "characterized by disruptions to the balance of chemical messengers and nerve pathways in the brain." (AstraZeneca, par. 2) People suffering from schizophrenia may view their environment abnormally and experience hallucinations. The reasons for development of schizophrenia are not yet known, but scientists and doctors have come up with possible causes. Many studies suggest that it can be genetically transmitted. Doctors seek to examine family members of patients with schizophrenia, because statistically one has a greater chance of having the disease if a family member had it. Other causes seem to include neurological disease, birth injury, neuroanatomical abnormalities -- like a legion or tumor on the brain -- or viral infection. It has been found that many schizophrenic patients have a biological disposition, meaning they are chemically unbalanced. Therefore, many times doctors prescribe antipsychotic medications like Thorazine to cure this disease (Hollandsworth 81).
Charlotte Perkins Gilman was able to describe how the woman in the story, Jane, slowly goes crazy. The story is written in first person journals, as if written by her as she slowly is driven mad. Gilman expresses an early objection in the story to the accepted "rest cure" that was urged upon both her and Jane. "You see he does not believe I am sick! ... Personally, I disagree with their ideas" ("The Yellow Wallpaper" 642). This passage is Gilman speaking out. The doctor husband of Jane applying this method of treatment on her symbolizes the treatment on Gilman applied by Dr. Mitchell. After writing the story Gilman comments "I wrote 'The Yellow Wallpaper', with its embellishments and additions to carry out the ideal (I never had hallucinations of objections to my mural decorations) and sent a copy to the physician who nearly drove me mad. He never acknowledged it" ("Why I Wrote 'The Yellow Wallpaper'?" 86). Many others, on the other hand, did acknowledge it. Patients took her story as an example of the lifestyle they should take on to cure themselves. A doctor from Kansas City wrote her after reading her story:
When I read the "Yellow Wallpaper" I was very much pleased with it; when I read it again I was delighted with it, and now that I have read it again I am overwhelmed with the delicacy of your touch and the correctness of portrayal. From a doctor's standpoint, and I am a doctor, you made a success. So far as I know, and I am fairly well up in literature, there has been no detailed account of incipient insanity. ("Why I Wrote 'The Yellow Wallpaper'?" 86)
Hence, Gilman had a profound affect on the medical community of her day by taking a risk. She wanted to help others, and through a novel presented the insight that she wished she had been given.
Gilman's more influential medical breakthrough was her exploration on the possibility of a mental illness that included hallucinations. Some argue, in Gilman's story Jane exhibited behavior that can only be a product of schizophrenia. Although Gilman did not describe this disease perfectly in her writing, she was the first person to present this behavior as a true illness. At this time, doctors typically would tell patients that they were not truly sick, which often led to the patient deteriorating mentally. Gilman assumed that the patient was led to hallucinations because "she is locked away from creativity" (Gilbert and Gubar 146). The woman is stricken of any enjoyment or enrichment when subjected to the "rest cure." Therefore, she must eventually find a way to be creative.
Gilman uses personal journals of Jane to illustrate how a mind would slowly deteriorate. Jane begins by having an obsession with some wallpaper, remarking in reference to the yellow wallpaper, "no wonder the children hated it! I should hate it myself if I had to live in the room long" ("The Yellow Wallpaper" 643). Jane is fixated on the fact that it is a child's room, and continues to refer to things about the room as being the way they are to accommodate a child. There are bars on the window and rings on the wall and she thinks these added accessories to the room are only for some children. Jane comments in the beginning of the story that "it is very seldom that mere ordinary people like John and myself secure ancestral halls for the summer" ("The Yellow Wallpaper" 641). The irony of Jane's fixation of the room being that of a child's and commenting that a summer home would be too costly for John and herself, is that the house was in fact an abandoned mental home. This explains the affordability of the house and the bars on the windows.
The fixation, however, is the first indication of Jane becoming mad and using her imagination. She then begins to see a figure lurking behind the wallpaper. It "has a kind of sub-pattern in a different shade, a particularly irritating one, for you can only see it in certain lights, and not clearly then.... I can see a strange, provoking, formless sort of figure, that seems to sulk about behind that silly conspicuous front design" ("The Yellow Wallpaper" 645). As time goes on, the figure behind the wallpaper slowly begins to take the form of a woman. This is the point at which Jane begins to hallucinate.
As her fixation with the paper increases, she begins to sense an unusual smell coming from the wallpaper. "I thought seriously of burning the house- to reach the smell. But now I am used to it. The only thing I can think of that it is like is the color the paper! A yellow smell" ("The Yellow Wallpaper" 650). The sensing of a smell marks a point where Jane has clearly departed from society. She describes the smell as a "yellow smell." There is no defining smell portrayed by a color, but she surely knows what kind of odor a "yellow smell" emits.
These behaviors can all be the product of schizophrenia. Although schizophrenia cannot strictly be said to be a result of a "rest" treatment that a woman is given for a post-partum depression, Gilman was correct that such a disease does exist.
Puerperal psychosis is a branch off of post-partum depression. It only infects about 0.1%-0.2% of deliveries, and it seriously affects even fewer. However, the affects include "hallucinations and delusions that frequently focus on the infant dying of being divine of demonic" (Leopold par.7). Therefore it is possible that the woman in "The Yellow Wallpaper" could have experienced hallucinations following the birth of her child.
In the end of the story Jane is driven completely mad. With such hallucinations, schizophrenics are often driven to do something mad. She befriends the woman in the wallpaper, and begins to feel sorrow and guilt for her. She sees her as being trapped behind the wallpaper, and she feels it is her duty to release her. Jane remarks as she defaces the walls: "Then I peeled off all the paper I could reach standing on the floor" ("The Yellow Wallpaper" 652). At this point, some argue that the story now takes on characteristics of a ghost story. Once most of the paper is off the walls the women is "released" and she begins to take on the form of Jane. As the story closes the women from the wallpaper begins to speak through Jane: "I've got out at last... in spite of you and Jane? And I've pulled off most of the paper, so you can't put me back!" ("The Yellow Wallpaper" 653). This new character for Jane takes appears to be not a characteristic of schizophrenia, but rather a trait of another mental disorder, called multiple personality.
Schizophrenia has become a much more recognized illness after the box office hit A Beautiful Mind which recaps the life of John Nash with his extraordinary mathematical discoveries and his life long struggle with schizophrenia, and does so in a way where his life and his struggle are glorified. Before this movie, schizophrenics typically only received publicity when they did something ghastly. "Andrea Yates... drowned (her five children) while in the grip of psychotic delusions. Ted Kaczynski built his lethal bombs with the false beliefs of paranoid schizophrenia. Rusty Weston, also a paranoid schizophrenic, killed 14 cats on his parents' Illinois farm before shooting up the U.S. Capitol, where he killed two police officers." (Shute, par. 16) Schizophrenia is taken as a serious disease because most patients are driven to commit acts either because the hallucinations tell them too or they are trying to avoid the hallucinations.
One of the editors of New England Magazine wrote Gilman to tell her of a case her short story solved. Gilman remarks about the man's response:
Later he explained that he had a friend who was in similar trouble, even to hallucinations about her wallpaper, and whose family were treating her as in the tale, that he had not dared show them my story till he knew that it was true, in part at least, and that when he did they were so frightened by it, so impressed by the clear implication of what ought to have been done, that they changed her wallpaper and the treatment of the case- and she recovered! This was triumph indeed. ("Why I Wrote 'The Yellow Wallpaper'?" 88)
There were many other cases like this one. Others took her story as an example to live off of and a means of curing themselves. She helped society identify with the fact that mental illness is a true illness. The ability to start with a hunch and rely upon that hunch to create a serious work seems to be a benchmark in the history of scientific progress. Gilman created a character based upon a suspicion from her own life, and helped the medical community recognize other "Janes" presenting with a post-partum depression as one suffering from a true illness.
Works Consulted
AstraZeneca International. "Schizophrenia: Key Facts." 28 April 2002. <http://www.psychiatry-in-practice.com/html/aboutseroquel/schizophrenia.asp>
Gilbert, Sanda , and Susan Gibar. "From the Madwomen in the Attic: The Women Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination." The Captive Imagination: A Casebook on "The Yellow Wallpaper." Ed. Catherine Golden. New York, NY. The Feminist Press, 1992. 145-148.
Gilman, Charlotte Perkins. The Living of Charlotte Perkins Gilman. Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1935.
Gilman, Charlotte Perkins. "The Yellow Wallpaper." The Norton Introduction to Fiction: Sixth Edition. Ed. Jerome Beaty. New York: Norton & Company. 1996. 641-653.
Gilman, Charlotte Perkins. "Why I Wrote 'The Yellow Wallpaper'?" "The Yellow Wall-paper" and the History of Its Publication and Reception: A Critical Edition and Documentary Casebook. Ed. Julie Bates Dock. University Park, PA. Pennsylvania State University Press, 1998. 86-9.
Hollandsworth, James G. Jr. The Physiology of Psychological Disorders: Schizophrenia, Depression, Anxiety, and Substance Abuse. New York: Plenum Press, 1990.
Leopold, Kathryn A. "Postpartum Depression." 30 Apr. 2001 <htttp://www.obgyn.net/femalepatient/default.asp?page=Leopold>
Shute, Nancy. "A Troubled Mind." U.S. News & World Report 25 March 2002: 45.
