The Yellow Wallpaper And What It Has On The Position And...

LeCompte 1 Shiyiya LeCompte Professor Susan Taylor English 1312 11 October 2014 â€Å"The Yellow Wallpaper† and What It Has to Say about the Position and Treatment of Women at the Turn of the Last Century â€Å"The Yellow Wallpaper† tells a single story, with a tight focus on a specific fictional woman, but the circumstances it drew from for its depiction were widespread. The events it depicts, while they may not have occurred exactly in reality, were written in parallel to true conditions and treatments of the time. Women were seen as inherently fragile, and subject to specific conditions due to this fragility - the 19th century diagnosis of â€Å"female hysteria† by this time was in decline, replaced by other conditions. The stifling of women s†¦show more content†¦This calls back to both the prevalence of hysteria itself as a diagnosis of women, and perhaps the beginnings of its discrediting in the 20th century, as John seems to believe the hysteria with which he has diagnosed his wife is a condition of little concern. I can strongly relate to this dismissal, as my father has for most of my life refused to acknowledge my depression as a real condition requiring more treatment than an order to exercise and eat vegetables . John s patriarchal insistence that LeCompte 2 he knows better than the narrator what will make her feel better, against her own protests, runs in a similar vein. The narrator s treatment has significant historical precendent. Hysteria itself has a long history through civilizations. An ancient Egyptian document identifies hysteria, with the cause as â€Å"spontaneous uterus movement within the female body† (Tasca et al.). The Greeks, too, apparently ascribed to this view - in Plato s Timaeus, the titlular character sees the uterus as â€Å"a living creature [...] which [...] travels around the body blocking passages, obstructing breathing, and causing disease (S. Gilman et al. 25). Hippocrates, in the fifth century BCE, was the first to use the term â€Å"hysteria† for this supposed womb-borne madness of women. He posited that the womb was sickened or unsatisfied without the effects of sexual activity, and that this was the cause of its wandering about the body and contributing to other afflictions