Madwomen in the Attic: Madness and Suicide in Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper” and Doris Lessing’s “To Room Nineteen”

Abstract

In writing about women’s anger in our last chapter, I am reminded of the passage from The Taming of the Shrew that I quoted in Chapter 3, Katherina’s last desperate outcry before she submits to Petruchio’s “taming”: “My tongue will tell the anger of my heart,/ Or else my heart concealing it will break. …” In that earlier chapter, as we saw, the sixteenth-century women who gathered in a walled garden in Moderata Fonte’s Venice were not silent, nor were their twenty-first century counterparts, the women in Marjane Satrapi’s Tehran, for whom talk functioned as “ventilation of the heart.” Like these fictional women, Arcangela Tarabotti and Valerie Solanas were also determined to “tell the anger” of their hearts, and although their hearts still may, in the end, have broken, at least it wasn’t from keeping their mouths shut. In this chapter, by contrast, I’d like to focus on what happens to women when they remain silent—when their anguish and despair are concealed and when their anger is unspoken. These are not untamed shrews, radical reformers, disposable daughters, or writers who need a quiet place to create. These are women we encounter every day of our lives. They are wives and mothers living lives of quiet—and untold— desperation. Like Jane Eyre’s Bertha Mason, Mr. Rochester’s first wife, they are madwomen hidden in plain sight. And most important, from our point of view here, in Reading Women’s Worlds they have rooms of their own.KeywordsPostpartum DepressionShort StoryFairy TaleWoman WriterYoung WifeThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.