A Sexist Guide to 19th Century Hysteria

The topic of hysteria has been one that has been prevalent within the study of feminist history, due to it being closely linked and “peculiarly relevant to the female experience”[1]. Hysteria is a word widely known to describe someone (no, this isn’t exclusive to women) who is acting in an erratic or often overly emotional way. Yet back in the 19^th Century the word was more prominently used as a diagnosis for women (yes, this time it is exclusive to women) when they were suffering from any mental health illness, or when they were simply not acting as a 19^th Century women should (because of course a women in 19^th Century society should never be over social, or over think, that is simply preposterous).

There has always been an “existence in virtually every era of Western culture of some clinical entity called hysteria.^“[1] This is evident through the literature written at the time, and one of the most important pieces of literature written within the 19^th Century regarding the attitude toward hysteria and mental health, not just for women but within the society as a whole, is a short story called The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman.

For those of you that have never come into contact with The Yellow Wallpaper, I highly suggest you pick up a copy as soon as you can. There is a reason as to why it has remained one of the more important pieces of fiction when looking at mental health and, in some respects, motherhood. The story follows an unnamed narrator and her descent into madness, after her husband (who is a physician and could, in our current society’s terms, be considered a gaslighter.[2]) has diagnosed her with “temporary nervous depression”, which in basic terms mean that he believes the narrator has suffered a nervous breakdown after the birth of their first child. The short story itself, is based upon the experiences of Perkins Gilman herself after giving birth[3], but I will touch upon that in more detail later on.

Of all of Perkins Gilman’s work, The Yellow Wallpaper is one that seems to have passed the test of time. Whenever you look into the literature surrounding women and the society they were living in within the 1800’s, The Yellow Wallpaper always seems to be mentioned, especially when the subject of mental illness and the treatments within this time period are brought to light. This is mainly due to its perception of hysteria, a phenomenon that took Victorian society by storm, and of course became the main diagnosis of women with literally any mental health issues (might I add that these were male doctors. Surprised? No, neither am I.)

The Yellow Wallpaper has become almost synonymous when discussing Victorian society’s relationship with mental health. This is simply because of the way that the narrator has documented her descent into madness has been written in such a profound way by Perkins Gilman. The reason it is written as it is, is because Perkins Gilman was actually writing from her own experiences with mental health and how she was treated. Five years prior to writing The Yellow Wallpaper, Perkins Gilman was prescribed the ‘rest cure’ – which in itself was an entirely sexist way of “curing” a woman suffering with mental illness. – The ‘rest cure’ was introduced as a form of treatment of hysteria in within the 19th Century. It was first brought to attention by Silas Weir Mitchell who was Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s physician, the very same one who prescribed her with the ‘rest cure’ (which is basically bed rest, but a bit more fancy.) that lead to the conception of The Yellow Wallpaper. It is said that “Weir saw the rest cure as particularly suited to treating women, partly because he thought women tolerated a lack of stimulation and inactivity better than men.”[4]. To condense that even further, he thought that women were more accustomed to doing nothing, that their little woman brain would thrive from a lack of stimulation. He may as well have said that Perkins Gilman’s post-natal depression (the correct medical term being postpartum depression), because that IS what she was suffering from, was due to her using her brain too much, or being too creative. In fact, within Perkins Gilman’s article Why I Wrote the Yellow Wallpaper she has written that his exact words were ““never touch pen, brush or pencil as long as [she] lived”.[5] To have a mental illness belittled into something that literally means suffering in the uterus is just downright despicable. But, just when you think it can’t get any worse, it does. Not only did he think that women’s mental illness was down to using their brain too much he also  “saw it as a corrective for women who were overly active, socially and physically.”[4]

Researching and reading this from a contemporary perspective, I can say this honestly does leave me speechless and questioning the research put into mental health during this time. But on the other side of the coin, we should really expect this general lack of understanding from the 19^th Century. Although I am slightly (okay, maybe more than slightly) outraged that women were being treated in this manner, especially women suffering from mental health issues, the stigma surrounding that of mental health within the 19^th Century was not one that was supportive nor understanding of people (because anyone can be affected by the negative impact of mental health) suffering with depression, anxiety, postpartum depression and the many other forms of mental health diagnosis.

The reason The Yellow Wallpaper has remained a popular and important piece of fiction for over 100 years, is because it shows a raw and, as I have said previously, profound account of what it feels like to be suffering and having no one to talk to, or understand what it is you are going through. It also reflects on the sexist society in which Perkins Gilman was living in and how it affected the perception of mental health.

Bibliography

[1] – Carroll Smith-Rosenburg, 1972, ‘The Hysterical Woman: Sex Roles and Role Conflict in 19th Century America’, Social Research, Volume 39, Issue 4, pp. 652-678, https://www.jstor.org/stable/40970115?seq=1

[2] – Sadie Trombetta, 2018, ‘Why The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman Should Be Required Reading’, Bustle, https://www.bustle.com/p/why-the-yellow-wallpaper-by-charlotte-perkins-gilman-should-be-required-reading-in-2018-9936873

[3] – https://msu.edu/~fellow17/wra210/final/Research%20Paper%20-%20Charlotte%20Perkins%20Gilman.pdf

[4] – https://www.sciencemuseum.org.uk/objects-and-stories/medicine/nerves-neuroses#:~:text=The%20rest%20cure,-A%20new%20condition&text=Hotspot%20text!&text=This%20player%20requires%20Javascript.,nervous%20diseases%2C%20Europe%2C%201862.&text=The%20cure%20was%20devised%20by,as%20a%20treatment%20for%20neurasthenia

[5] – Charlotte Perkins Gilman, ‘Why I Wrote the Yellow Wallpaper’ , The Forerunner, https://www.nlm.nih.gov/exhibition/theliteratureofprescription/education/materials/WhyIWroteYellowWallPaper.pdf

Crime and punishment in early modern England are an interesting topic of debate, whether the system actually worked? Whether gender and class had anything to do with the sentence for your crime? And of course, whether it was fair and just. The justice system in early modern England was quick and, in some ways, effective, however, whether or not you receive the outcome you hoped for really depended on the kind of person you were, in certain cases, it also depended on the evidence given at court. The court system within early modern England was not as corrupt as you would presume, however, there were certain loopholes that could help you out when facing trial, such as paying certain people to testify against the person you were accusing, or help you out of being convicted of crimes you were being accused of. 

The most common punishment for women during the early modern period would be death by burning, or being burned at the stake. This was a recurring punishment for women who had been accused and found guilty of a crime called Petty Treason which, in our modern period, is now known as mariticide. Petty Treason was the act of a wife killing their husband, or the King of the house, (do you see where this is going?), of course treason was an act of crime against the crown, and seeing as the patriarch of the house was seen as the King of his household, the crime was known as petty treason, a crime of which our main focus of this blog was found guilty of^[1]. 

Mrs Elizabeth Lylliman, only 50 years old, had found herself in the Old Bailey. This meant that a grand jury had seen her crime as a very serious accusation, and instead of sending her to her local magistrate for it to be dealt with, they had decided to send her case to the Old Bailey which is how I came across her individual case. Mrs Lylliman’s court trial has been described within the picture shown. In a quick summary, it is said that she begged and pleaded to see her husband’s body and that the jury, that was made up predominantly by men (as of course it was in the early modern period court system), saw this as an act or a “mad kind of Artiface” as they called it, meaning they saw it as artificial, this was commonplace within the courtroom when the jury believed the persons on trial were putting on an act and not being sincere in their actions. Although it was a slight gamble when trying to convince the jury you were being sincere, it was quite a popular tactic used to play on the emotions of the ones you stood before. They said she had done this to drag the attention away from her being the murderer and an attempt to fit into the role of a widow who desperately wants her husband back. She was found guilty however, as her husband had survived the initial attack and managed to tell a cobbler that his wife, Elizabeth Lylliman, had indeed stabbed him.

Within Garthine Walker’s Crime, Gender, and Social Order in Early Modern England^[2], she includes a statistic that “between ten and twenty percent,” violent offences were acted out by women. This does not include the percentage of women who were accused of witchcraft, only those of violence. Walker brings to light the fact that it is easy to believe this percentage is so low due to the fact that women were docile toward their “violently disposed husband’s”, but this isn’t the entire truth, as Walker states that by following this idea, you are challenging the idea that women within this period could also be brutal and carry out criminal activities. 

When looking into this court case, and seeing the transcript given it seems odd that it is never recorded as to exactly why Elizabeth Lylliman attacked her husband. If you take into account what Walker pointed out in saying that most wives were docile toward their abusive partners, it seems plausible that Elizabeth Lylliman may have no longer wanted to remain docile, and took matters into her own hands by dealing with her abusive partner. When taking Walker’s points into consideration, looking into this particular case, it is easy to see that Elizabeth Lylliman falls into the group of women who may have committed violent acts out of necessity, rather than out of wanting to purely commit a crime for the sake of it.

Bibliography

^[1] – Old Bailey Proceedings (www.oldbaileyonline.org, version 8.0, March 2018) 7th July 1675 Elizabeth Lylliman Trial, t-16750707, Accessed November 19th 2019

^[2] – Walker, Garthine, “Voices of Feminine Violence”, Crime, Gender, and Social Order in Early Modern England, Cambridge University Press, 2003