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Theft in London in the Eighteenth Century
Theft in London in the Eighteenth Century
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Theft is defined as the act of taking some property that belongs to someone else in a manner that is dishonest and keeping it for oneself. It is categorized as a crime that is punishable by different methods depending on the different classes of theft. These include petty thieves who might steal minor items such as a pen or a bottle of water without any violence. The extreme end is robbery with violence where for example robbers enter a bank or other premise, takes hostages and make away with property of considerable worth and cause bodily harm or even death to some innocent people in the process.
There are many different reasons why thieves begin stealing. Some of these include poverty where people lack the necessities in life such as food and clothing. Such dire situations may lead one to take food and clothes to sustain them. Another cause of theft is greed. Some people may desire a life that they cannot afford and may steal vast amounts of money or property so that they can buy fancy cars and houses that they would otherwise be unable to obtain. Bitterness or jealousy towards other people that may be wealthy or successful through either lawful or unlawful means may motivate thieves to target them. They do this either as a means of revenge towards those who gained wealth unlawfully; or to only get a piece of the pie from those who they think have too much.
Theft often begins with little things such as kids stealing stationery from each other in school at a young age or even stealing money from their parents at home. If this behavior is ignored and expected to pass, it will most likely fester, and before long, a chronic thief is born. It is a habit that is hard to get rid of and must be addressed as early as possible before it escalates to full on violent robbery. Some measures of solving the problem include counseling in case of compulsive behavior, stern warnings and punishment such as suspension from school for minors, juvenile detention, fines, and community service for petty offenders. Harsher measures like long jail terms need to be implemented in cases of seasoned thieves. This paper seeks to address the issue of theft in the city of London between 1750 and 1770, some of the causes, effects, and methods of punishment of the vice.
The city of London in the eighteenth century was undergoing the Industrial Revolution. It was a bustling metropolitan, characterized by two extremes of poverty and wealth. This was the main reason as to why many resorted to crime. Most of the criminals and thieves were drawn from the poorest of the city who saw stealing property as the only way that they could alleviate their poverty. During social functions when the rich and the poor would come together, the thieves saw the opportunity to steal from those more fortunate than themselves.
Crime was organized and was exacerbated by the lack of an organized police force in the city. Most watchmen in the city were ordinary citizens, and theirs was a dangerous job. The wealthy people in the town thus fell prey to the organized criminals many times. The town did not also have a recognized administration; hence the process of apprehending the criminals such as thieves was quite tricky. These conditions led to theft becoming a growing enterprise in the city. Thieves often worked in cahoots with prostitutes in brothels.
Alcoholism was recognized as a significant cause of theft in addition to poverty. Under the influence, men were found to do things that were uncharacteristic of them. Corruption was a widespread vice at the time, and even those who had been convicted with overwhelming evidence against them could walk away from the court free by making bribes. The Old Bailey was the court that was tasked with handling the many crimes in the city, theft included. The court prescribed many forms of punishment, some of which had a questionable level of effectiveness. It is also important to note that some of those convicted of crimes often ended up not serving their sentences at all. The prescribed punishments, therefore, may not have been an effective deterrent of future crimes, theft included.
The Old Bailey was the London court in which various crimes were tried between 1584 and 1835 when it was renamed the Central Criminal Court and expanded its jurisdiction to include other areas outside London. How the court proceedings were entirely different from that of today. There weren’t any lawyers to represent the criminals and hence the judgment of judges and prosecutors were mainly relied on often without many questions asked. Punishment by death was a typical sentence until the nineteenth century.
There was the presence of a grand jury which was made up of wealthy men. Their job was to decide whether there was sufficient evidence to try the accused before a jury and most cases were thrown out at this point for lack of evidence. The problem with the grand jury was that they had no legal training or background and hence their judgment was often biased. Addition of a clerk to advise the grand jury ensured that more cases proceeded to trial.
The trial itself began with the charges being brought against the accused either by the prosecutor or victim and witnesses to the crime would then be called. The defendants would also be given the chance to defend themselves and even call their witnesses. Witnesses who could testify that the accused had a good reputation lightened their sentence or even led to the acquittal of the accused person. At this time, many of those who were charged were encouraged to plead not guilty to their crimes as it would lessen the severity of their punishment whereas if they pleaded guilty. It was difficult to change their sentence. Defendants often lost their cases as they were unable to defend themselves in the short time that the trials lasted.
The appearance and increasing frequency of lawyers for the defendants as from the 1820s helped their case considerably. The accused persons recognized that lawyers significantly reduced the severity of punishment. The lawyers did this often by questioning the prosecution witnesses on their motives, especially if they were accomplices with the accused but testified for immunity. This placed the burden of proof on the prosecution who had to go to greater lengths to acquire solid witnesses whose testimonies could stand up to the defense lawyers in court. A lawyer for the defense was mandated from 1903.
Judges then had the same weighty responsibility they bore then; determining whether the accused was guilty or not. Before the increase of lawyers in the courtroom; however, they played significant roles in cross-examining witnesses and maintaining order in the courtrooms. The juries were an integral part of the ruling given by the judge. They delivered their verdict and could ask the judge to be merciful in their sentencing. Many of those who were sentenced to death were often pardoned. Others sentences included fines, imprisonment, whipping among others. It is important to note that some of the punishments given were not given as prescribed; the accused often received a different penalty from those they had been sentenced to. The provision for an appeal was quite limited during the nineteenth century; the accused could only apply for a pardon.
The death penalty was the most prescribed method of punishment in the eighteenth century, meaning that even petty thieves could be sentenced to die for stealing a handkerchief. The judges could, however, give partial verdicts and the accused given more than one form of punishment such as imprisonment coupled with whipping. The charges could, however, be lessened by the intervention of the clergy and pardons. Lesser sentences such as flogging and fines were often given instead of hanging, and some of those sentenced ended up serving no punishment at all.
The benefit of clergy was one of the alternative forms of punishment. This meant that the church would be allowed to punish its members who were found guilty of a crime. This meant that the judge handed over church members to the clergy to mete out suitable punishment to the offender. After a while, it was realized that some severe offenses were receiving far too light sentences by the actions of the clergy. Some crimes were then exempted from the benefit of the clergy, and this included pickpocketing and stealing from the church. Stealing an amount of over forty shillings was also exempted. This meant that most crimes of theft were taken by the judges themselves.
Branding was another mode of punishment for thieves who either received the benefit of the clergy or even sentenced by the courts. The accused were branded on the thumb by a hot iron at the end of the court proceedings. It was claimed however that petty thieves often bribed the prosecutor so that they could have the branding iron employed on their thumbs while it was still cold. The branding identified which kind of crime such as F for felon and T for Theft.
Pickpocketing was a minor stealing offense but was punishable by death as were more serious crimes such as violent theft. It has been mentioned however that many of the death sentences passed did not go through but were replaced by other penalties. Minor offenses such as pickpocketing were later removed from being punishable by death.
The death penalty was also dropped for women who pleaded pregnancy at their time of sentencing. Women from among the jurors would examine the woman, and if pregnant, their punishment would be postponed until after the baby was born. Upon the birth of the baby, the death sentence or other penalty was often done away with mostly due to sympathy on the newborn child and the substantial cost of raising the child without its mother.
The death penalty was executed mainly by the act of hanging the convict in public. The public spectacle was meant to be a deterrent to others from committing the same crime. The body of those who had been strangled to death was often fought for by teachers of anatomy and the relatives of the deceased who wanted to bury it. Other methods of execution were even more brutal. Such techniques included the convicts being burned at the stake or being drawn and quartered.
Imprisonment was the most preferred form of punishing thieves. Imprisonment took many ways such as imprisonment with hard labor. The hard labor was meant to teach the thieves to work hard to earn their living while at the same deterring others from becoming thieves themselves. Prisons were also built to keep the public safe from repeat offenders. Transportation was also another form of punishment. The convicts were sent to far lands such as Australia. This was a deterrent for committing crimes, and no one wanted to be thrown away from their hometowns to distant lands where they did not know anyone.
Corporal punishment such as whipping was also predominant among those convicted of theft. It was usually given in addition to other sentences such as imprisonment. Offenders would be stripped to the waist and flogged until their backs were bloody. This was carried out publicly as a deterrent measure to other would-be thieves. In the eighteenth century whipping of women was abolished and whipping was also categorized into either public or private whipping within the prisons or courthouse.
Fines were a punitive measure for thieves. The thief would be ordered to pay back what they had stolen and another punishment such as imprisonment added to the fine. This was related to discipline by forfeiture of goods where a convict would be ordered to surrender all their property to the government. Often the prosecution lied to the court that the convict owned no assets that they could forfeit.
Pardons, mostly for petty offenses were granted to the offenders. Most of those who had been sentenced to death either had their sentences reduced or had their crimes pardoned and did not serve any penalty at all. This made more sense since killing a person for stealing a handkerchief hardly did anything to reform the offender, but it did deter others from committing the same crime. Other forms of punishment included paying back to the victim what they stole, expulsion from the country especially in case of violent robbery or taking valuable property.
The death penalty that was in common practice in London during the eighteenth century can be said to be an overly harsh sentence. A petty offender deserved a much more appropriate form of punishment depending on their crime, be it picking pockets or robbery with violence. Imprisonment and fines were much more aptly suited to petty stealing offenses. The reason for stealing was also a matter that should have weighed heavily on the judge while he made his rulings. The justice system was still in the early stages of development in the eighteenth century and since then; many advances have been made towards reforms.
Theft is among the most common misdemeanors in society today. The unequal distribution of wealth means that the poor will always aim to steal from those who have more than them. Other reasons for theft include psychological problems, greed, corruption, revenge, intent to inflict pain, among many others. It is essential that the crime is punished suitably, borrowing from some of the methods that were used in the city of London in the eighteenth century. Imprisonment and fines would be the most suitable. It is also essential to look for ways of rehabilitating juvenile offenders as a means of preventing the growth of seasoned criminals in the future. The Old Bailey Proceedings and rulings certainly set a precedent and are the basis of many of the methods of punishing crimes such as theft to this day.
APPENDIX
Figure 1: Map of eighteenth century London
John Rocque’s Map of London, 1746
Figure 2 : Table showing number of executions of females by years
Period 1735 – 44 1745 – 54 1755 – 64 1765 – 74 1775 – 84 1785 – 94 1795 – 99 Totals
Sentenced to death 258 186 155 202 319 325 150 1596
Reprieved 190 132 98 164 253 276 129 1243
% reprieved 74% 71% 63% 81% 79% 85% 86% 78%
Hanged 60 49 53 33 59 46 21 323
Burned 8 5 5 5 6 3 0 32
Total executed 68 54 57 38 65 49 21 355
Source: http://www.capitalpunishmentuk.org/fem1735.html
Bibliography
Beattie, John Maurice. Crime and the Courts in England, 1660-1800. Vol. 404. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1986.
Clive Emsley, Tim Hitchcock and Robert Shoemaker, “Crime and Justice – Punishment Sentences at the Old Bailey”, Old Bailey Proceedings Online (www.oldbaileyonline.org, version 7.0, 21 February 2019 )https://www.digitalpanopticon.org/The_Old_Bailey_Criminal_TrialLinebaugh, Peter. The London hanged: Crime and civil society in the eighteenth century. Verso, 2003.May, Margaret. “Innocence and experience: the evolution of the concept of juvenile delinquency In the mid-nineteenth century.” Victorian Studies 17, no. 1 (1973): 7-29.
McLynn, Frank. Crime and punishment in eighteenth century England. Routledge, 2013.Ray, Gerda. “Albion’s fatal tree: crime and society in eighteenth century England.” (1976): 86-93.
Shoemaker, Robert, “The Old Bailey Criminal Trial,” Digital Panopticon, accessed February 15 2019, https://www.digitalpanopticon.org/The_Old_Bailey_Criminal_Trial
The Yellow Wallpaper
The Yellow Wallpaper
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“The Yellow Wallpaper” is a story about a woman who suffers from depression and finally goes insane. The narrator is the woman herself expressing her various emotions. She is married to John, who is a doctor. They travel for a vacation because John thinks that his wife needs air and rest so that she can get better. The narrator who is John’s wife heartily disagrees, but she cannot make this known to John who is a doctor because no one would believe her word over his. Her brother is also a doctor and agrees with John’s opinion. John does not want his wife to exert herself in any way and always warns her against letting her wild imagination get the better of her. The narrator keeps her thought and feelings to herself and sneaks some time to write the story which chronicles her everyday experiences. The main themes in the story are the importance of self-expression and the oppression of women in marriage (Gale 2016).
The story begins with the narrator’s description of their vacation home. The grounds are described to be magnificent, and the house itself is enormous. She thinks that it belonged to some aristocratic family. However, she links to think that it is haunted so that it can deepen the mystery and make her wonder what happened there. She says, “A colonial mansion, a hereditary estate, I would say a haunted house…”(Gilman 1999) when she tells her husband about it, he laughs at her, but she is not offended. She says that it is to be expected in marriage. According to the narrator, she settles for the thought that there is something queer about the house, which relates to her illness, which is nervous depression (Callahan 2018). She confesses that her husband belittles her generally, her ideas and thoughts seem farfetched to him. Being a doctor, he is more practical and rational. He forbids her from doing any work that would exert her, but she thinks that some work.” and exercise would be good for her. The narrator yields to his wishes explaining that, “. “So I take phosphates or phosphites–whichever it is, and tonics, and journeys, and air, and exercise, and am absolutely forbidden to “work” until I am well again.”
Her journal is a way of escape, and she keeps this a secret from John. She then launches into a description of the house which used to be a nursery, then a gymnasium because of the rings on the wall. Of most concern to the narrator is the ugly wallpaper on the walls of her room. “It was nursery first and then playroom and gymnasium, I should judge; for the windows are barred for little children, and there are rings and things in the walls.”(Gilman 1999)She thinks that the surrounding of the house is quite beautiful with gardens of flowers. Soon she hears her husband coming, and she is forced to stop her writing.
Weeks pass at the summer house, and the narrator becomes good at hiding her writing from John. She dwells a lot on the wallpaper. At first, John was willing to change it for her sake then changed his mind. He explained that changing it would only yield more complaint from his wife because of her neurotic condition. She starts to imagine people walking around the house which reminds her of her childhood terrors. She focuses on the wallpaper that is torn in some parts and the heavy furniture fixed on the ground. She wanted to take a room on the ground floor, but John wanted an open place for her.
During the Fourth of July holidays, her family comes to visit, leaving her exhausted. Her husband threatens to send her back to the doctor under whose care she suffered a nervous breakdown. She spends most of her days alone, and the wallpaper is the center of her attention. She has made out a pattern on the paper of a woman stooping down on the background. “I can see a strange, provoking, formless sort of figure, that seems to skulk about behind that silly and conspicuous front design.” The main pattern shows the bars of a cage. She gets scared and tries to get John to have them leave, but he always dismissed her concerns (Liu 2018).
The narrator hides her fixation so that no one can investigate it. Jennie, the nurse one day examines the paper because she found yellow stains on the narrator’s clothes. John thinks that his wife’s tranquility is because of her improving condition but she gets less sleep at night and the smell of the wallpaper dominates her senses even when she is outside. She sees the woman in the wallpaper shaking the bars of the cage and manages to escape briefly. The narrator writes, “The front pattern does move–and no wonder! The woman behind shakes it!” (Gilman 1999) The narrator herself also creeps around the house sometimes.
She becomes paranoid that John and Jennie have discovered her obsession with the wallpaper and she decides to peel it off during the night. The next day, went into a frenzy tearing the paper in an attempt to free the woman stuck inside (Payne 2017). The narrator goes insane, seeing many creeping women and believing herself to have merged from the wallpaper. When her husband comes home and sees her, he faints, and the narrator feels inconvenienced that she has to creep over his body. “Now why should that man have fainted? But he did, and right across my path by the wall, so that I had to creep over him every time!”(Gilman 1999)
From reading Gilman’s story, the central theme is the importance of self-expression. The narrator was kept under mental and physical constraints so that she could not express herself. The first instance where this is shown is when John laughs at the narrator after she tells him that the house might be haunted. “He has no patience with faith, an intense horror of superstition, and he scoffs openly at any talk of things not to be felt and seen and put down in figures.”(Gilman 1999) The narrator is more imaginative and likes to make stories up in her mind, a fact that John hates and dissuades her from it. John does not believe that his wife, the narrator is actually sick. He tells her family and friends that there is nothing wrong with her, that she only has temporary nervous depression. No one would believe her because both her brother and husband are famous physicians and they have the same diagnosis for her.
The doctors propose that for Gilman to get better, she should take a journey and get plenty of air. She should also avoid all forms of work. She is not given a chance to say what she thinks. She writes, “Personally, I disagree with their ideas. Personally, I believe that congenial work, with excitement and change, would do me good.”(Gilman 1999) Because of this, she takes up writing as a hobby, but she has to keep it a secret. She describes their new summer home, a magnificent mansion but which she thinks must be haunted. When she tells this to John, he tells her that she must be catching a cold and closes the window. When they moved into the house, she had preferred a downstairs room, but her husband would not let her choose. He said that she needs a big airy room with lots of space and therefore they took the room upstairs. The narrator spends her days looking around the house and the grounds and writing about them, but she must put away her writings when she hears her husband. He does not allow her to write because he thinks that she will overexert herself and not get better (Payne 2017).
Gilman gets so fixated on the wallpaper that is yellow and torn in some places. John was willing to have the room repapered so that she would feel better, but later he changed his mind. He told her that she was letting her fancies get the better of her and it would be wrong to give in to the whims of a patient like her (Dennis 2019). After this, the narrator feels guilty for being such a burden on her husband who takes such good care of her; she wishes she could be of better help to him. The narrator also feels very discouraged that she has no one with whom to discuss her writings; she spends most of her days alone. John promised that she could have visitors over when she got better.
Because the narrator has nothing else to do, her days are spent focusing and obsessing on the wallpaper. She begins to make out patterns on the paper, at the forefront there is a cage, and there is a woman behind it. The woman often shakes the bars of the cage trying to escape. Her current imaginations remind her of her childhood when she would lie awake for hours because of her fantasies. She says, “I used to lie awake as a child and get more entertainment and terror out of blank walls, and plain furniture than most children could find in a toy-store.” (Hood 2017) She hears Jennie, the nurse, coming up the stairs. Jennie keeps an eye on the narrator and her baby to make sure that she doesn’t exert herself. The narrator describes Jennie as an excellent housekeeper but has no dreams for any other profession (Marston & Rockwell 1991). Jennie is John’s brother and shares his opinion that writing is what made the narrator sick in the first place. Jennie would have been the perfect companion for the narrator, but she is also keen to ensure that the narrator is subdued.
The only time that the narrator was allowed to have guests was during the Fourth of July holiday. Afterward, she was worn out, and her husband thinks of sending her back to Mitchell, a doctor who treated one of his wife’s friends. The narrator is terrified at this thought and cries a lot when she is by herself. However, when her husband is around, she is careful to show herself to be happy and calm. Jennie leaves her alone most of the time, and she lay on the bed focused on the wallpaper. She concentrates on trying to make out the patterns in the wallpaper that sound scary and alarming. She writes, “I can almost fancy radiation after all,–the interminable grotesques seem to form around a common centre and rush off in headlong plunges of equal distraction.” (Golden 2013)
The narrator tires of lying down all the time and tries to convince her husband to let her visits her cousins Henry and Julia, but John adamantly refuses to let her go. She cried after, and her husband carried her up to the bed and urged her to calm down. Another day she tried to tell him that she wasn’t improving much in the summer home and they should go back home. John said to her that their home was not yet repaired; therefore they would stay on for a few more weeks. After this, the narrator saw the woman in the cage on the wallpaper trying to escape. She resolved to tear down the wallpaper because she suspected that Jennie and John had discovered her obsession with it. She peeled it off one night, and the day after that, she became insane. She believed that the woman in the wallpaper had escaped with others and they were now creeping around the house (Hood 2017). The narrator similarly began creeping around the house and locked herself in her room.
From the story, the narrator was never allowed to express herself in any way. From the beginning when she got sick, she thought that some work and exercise and work would do her good but her husband and brother had a contrary opinion. When they got to the new summer home, her husband would not let her choose a room of her liking (Gale 2016). He warned her against entertaining her wild imaginations as she was very fragile. She had no choice but to keep her writing a hobby. Her writing would have been an outlet for her pent-up emotions, and she would not have felt so confined. If the narrator had been allowed to express herself, she would have done what she knew would make her heal faster. If John had removed the wallpaper as his wife requested she would not have gone into a frenzy and eventually gone insane. John is primarily to blame for his wife’s insanity; he continually refused to grant any wishes that she made including visiting relatives or even a little work (Liu 2018). Self-expression would have kept her sane.
References
Callahan, A. (2018). Sickness and contamination in The yellow wallpaper and Maggie: a girl of the streets.
Dennis, C. E. (2019). Creativity and Madness: The Misunderstandings Behind Mental Health.
Dosani, S. (2018). The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman: a gothic story of postnatal psychosis–psychiatry in literature. The British Journal of Psychiatry, 213(1), 411-411.
Gale, C. L. (2016). A Study Guide for Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s” Yellow Wallpaper”. Gale Cengage Learning.
Gilman, C. P. (1999). The yellow wallpaper (p. 328). Project Gutenberg.
Golden, C. J. (2013). Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s The yellow wall-paper: a sourcebook and critical edition. Routledge.
Hood, R. M. (2017). Invisible Voices: Revising Feminist Approaches to Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s” The Yellow Wallpaper” by Including the Narrative of Mental Illness.
Liu, L. (2018). The Women’s Struggle in a Patriarchal Society.
Marston, P. J., & Rockwell, B. (1991). Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper”: Rhetorical Subversion in Feminist Literature. Women’s Studies in Communication, 14(2), 58-72.
Payne, S. (2017). Monstrous Maladies”: Oppression, Transgression, and Degeneration in The Picture of Dorian Gray and “The Yellow Wallpaper.
The Yellow Wallpaper Mental Illness and Oppression in Marriage
The Yellow Wallpaper: Mental Illness and Oppression in Marriage
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Mental illness is a complicated issue in society because some people believe that it is not a ‘real’ illness like pneumonia or heart disease which have obvious physical symptoms. Some people with mental illness have been accused of faking illness for various reasons. There are many negative attitudes surrounding mental illness, and this is why there is a lot of stigma around the issue. Individuals experiencing challenges with their mental wellbeing find it difficult to seek help and share their diagnosis with those close to them, such as their family and friends. Depression is one of the most prevalent mental illnesses for which people should seek medical diagnosis and treatment. However, due to the stigma surrounding mental illness, many sick people hide their symptoms and feelings, choosing to behave as normally as possible even as they suffer inside. Literature is one avenue that can be used to address critical social issues such as mental illness. In her short story ‘The Yellow Wallpaper,’ Charlotte Perkins Gilman explores the social issues of mental illness and oppression in marriage.
The narrator in the story tells her story from the first-person point of view. Gilman wrote the story based on her own experiences. The narrator is a married woman with postpartum depression, but her husband refuses to acknowledge the fact that she is unwell. Although the narrator knows her condition is serious, she dares not voice any kind of opposition as her husband John as well as her brother both agree that she is only suffering from temporary nervous depression (Pokorná, 2013). Both of them being respected physicians, she cannot make a case against them. John believes that all his wife needs is plenty of rest and air, and they take a holiday home in the country to achieve this. While living in the countryside, the narrator is not allowed to do any kind of work, visit anyone or have any visitors over. Her husband wants her to stay calm and avoid any kind of stimulation, including her own thoughts and imagination. He refuses to listen to any of her requests, and she ends up having a psychotic break.
Whenever a woman gives birth, she undergoes many changes, and this is bound to affect her mental health. Almost all women experience ‘baby blues’ after birth, but some have a more severe condition known as postpartum depression. Baby blues might involve feelings of helplessness and weeping, but these soon go away. Postpartum depression symptoms persist for a long time and need medical attention to treat. The American Psychological Association reports that, on average, one in every seven women who give birth experience postpartum depression in the first year after delivery. There are roughly 4 million live births every year in the United States, and this translates to about 600,000 women diagnosed with clinical postpartum depression annually. These figures represent live births, and on accounting for stillbirths, miscarriages and other complications in pregnancy, the number rises to roughly 900,000 women each year (American Psychological Association 2019). Experts believe that not all women with postpartum depression seek medical help; thus, there are many more cases that go unreported and untreated. These women fail to seek medical attention for several reasons, one of them being that no one believes they are sick. This is the case in the short story, ‘The Yellow Wallpaper.’
The narrator in the story has an undiagnosed mental illness which everyone dismisses as a temporary situation to be cured by rest and air. The narrator knows she is getting progressively worse and tries to hide her symptoms from her husband, who does not believe her. He remains quite dismissive of her, to the point where she begins to doubt her own illness. She writes, “You see he does not believe I am sick! And what can one do?” (Gilman 1999) She tries to compose herself as much as possible for her husband. However, as the story progresses, readers can see her situation getting worse. She explains that she is forbidden to do any kind of work, including writing, which she believes would do her good. “I think sometimes that if I were only well enough to write_ a little it would relieve the press of ideas and rest me.” (Gilman 1999) Jennie, John’s sister, takes care of the baby and all the housework so the narrator can have all the rest she needs. With no form of entertainment or pastime, she is left to dwell on her thoughts and sickness. The yellow wallpaper in her room takes up all her attention to the point that she can barely think of anything else. She begins to see images of women behind the patterns on the paper, trying to get free. Towards the end of the story, the images become real enough, and the narrator believes she is one of the women who escaped from the wallpaper. She ends up having a psychotic episode as a result of her untreated condition.
Postpartum depression remains an issue in today’s society, as shown by the significant number of women diagnosed with the condition each year. One of the obstacles in the treatment of any mental illness is the stigma surrounding it. A sick person could be labelled dramatic, attention-seeking, or any other kind of negative label. Such people try to hide their illness to the world and carry on as if everything is well. This is the exact situation that the narrator in ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’ experiences. However, hiding the symptoms only makes matters worse. The short story helps people understand the danger of ignoring or dismissing mental illness (Hume 2002). The story reflects the experience of many women with postpartum depression and how they are treated by those around them. The text increases awareness on how people’s should pay attention to mental illness and seek proper medical care. The narrator in the story was subject to the ‘resting cure’ which only exacerbated matters.
‘The Yellow Wallpaper’ explores another critical social issue; oppression in marriage. The .narrator is oppressed in her marriage, but she does not see it that way. She believes that her husband is only trying to help her. John being a doctor, assumes he is qualified to diagnose his wife’s illness, yet he does not take the time to listen to her. He continually dismisses her and laughs at her outright. This type of belittling behaviours have led the narrator to keep her thoughts and opinions to herself as she is sure her husband would frown upon them. When a spouse feels like they cannot express themselves in any way, this is a sign of oppression (Qasim et al. 2015). John also keeps the narrator’s family away from her under the guise of protecting her mental state. This level of control amounts to oppression. An example of this is when she writes, “…how I wish he would let me go and make a visit to Cousin Henry and Julia.” (Gilman 1999) As an adult woman, the narrator should be free to make her own choices, but she needs her husband’s consent for everything. John even refuses to let her choose a room she likes in their temporary home, or renovate the room he chose for them. Additionally, the narrator is forbidden from writing, something she believes would relieve the pressure of her illness and make her better. Jennie stays with the family so that she can monitor the narrator’s every move.
Many women today are oppressed in their marriages, although there are no exact figures available. Some women, such as the narrator in ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’ believe that their spouses care about them and only want the best for them. However, in cases like that of the narrator, some actions amount to oppression and tyranny. Any adult should be allowed to do what they feel is best for their wellbeing, and that includes seeking proper medical care and indulging in activities they enjoy. In the short story, John controlled every aspect of his wife’s life including what she ate, where she slept, how long she could rest, what she could do, and who could visit her (Qasim et al. 2015). He even threatened to send her to Weir Mitchell, a doctor who advocated for the resting cure if she failed to get better. ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’ allows married people to see the limits of what their spouses can dictate, and how extreme tyranny can lead to disaster.
In conclusion, mental illness and oppression in marriage remain matters of concern for many people in society today. Literature is a critical avenue for examining such social issues, and Charlotte addresses these sensitive topics in her short story, ‘The Yellow Wallpaper.’ The narrator in the story failed to get the correct treatment for postpartum depression because those around her did not believe she was seriously sick. She ended up having a mental breakdown. Such dismissive attitudes and stigma around mental health remain to this day, and the story should be a warning on the seriousness of the issue. Oppression in the marriage also contributed to the narrator’s woes, as she was unable to make any decisions regarding her mental wellbeing.
References
“What is postpartum depression & anxiety?” American Psychological Association. https://www.apa.org/pi/women/resources/reports/postpartum-depressionGilman, C. P. (1999). The yellow wallpaper. Project Gutenberg.
Hume, B. A. (2002). Managing Madness in Gilman’s” The Yellow Wall-Paper”. Studies in American Fiction, 30(1), 3-20.
Pokorná, A. (2013). Depiction of Mental Illness in The Yellow Wallpaper.
Qasim, N., Mehboob, S., Akram, Z., & Masrour, H. (2015). Women’s Liberation: The Effects of Patriarchal Oppression on Women’s Mind. International Journal of Asian Social Science, 5(7), 382-393.