by Jill Bergman
autobiographical experience with an illness that plagued her off and on for her entire life and with the treatment for that illness that she received at Mitchell’s hands. At issue—in the story and, I would argue, in Gilman’s letter to
Mitchell— is a crucial question that faced women of the late- nineteenth cen-
tury, when traditional Victorian gender roles still held sway and when the
medical profession was in its ascendance: Who had the right to speak about a
woman’s experience of illness? Put more generally: Who had the authority to
pronounce meaning about women’s bodies and health?23 Gilman’s relationship
with Mitchell is widely discussed in the scholarship, as is the fact that Mitchell merited explicit (and unflattering) mention in “The Yellow Wall- Paper.” Although the question of who might have been the true target of Gilman’s cri-
tique in the story is beyond the scope of this chapter (and there could even
Tuttle / 195
be more than one target), the interpretive value of Gilman’s letter to Mitch-
ell is difficult to ignore.24
On April 19, 1887, preparing to leave her Providence, Rhode Island, home
for Mitchell’s Philadelphia sanitarium, Gilman wrote in her diary, “Snowed
yesterday. Cold night. Wintry this morning. . . . Take baby to Mary’s. . . .
Come over home. . . . Begin to write an account of myself for the doctor.” In her autobiography, Gilman claimed that before her visit to Mitchell she sent
him “a long letter giving ‘the history of the case’ in a way a modern psychologist would have appreciated. Dr. Mitchell only thought it proved self- conceit.”
Mitchell was known for his authoritarian stance and his heavy- handed meth-
ods of mastering the patient’s will. His assumption that women ought to de-
fer to their physicians’ authority was commonly cited: “Wise women choose
their doctors and trust them. The wisest ask the fewest questions.”25
The letter itself, however, eluded scholars for decades; some even considered it apocryphal until it was found to be residing quietly among Zona Gale’s papers at the Wisconsin His tori cal Society. Discovered first by Davis and shortly thereafter by Knight, the sixteen- page letter opens with Gilman’s professed desire “to make you acquainted with all the facts of the case, that you may form a deeper judgment than from mere casual examination” (see fig ure 9.2). Those
“facts” include a detailed outline of her family tree and the health history of her parents and grandparents, followed by an even more thorough physical
and “mental history” of herself. This letter reveals a great deal about who is authorized to tell the story of Gilman’s illness and in what manner: one’s sex and professional status determine this authority as well as the social and literary conventions that govern its articulation. Throughout the letter Gilman
called attention to Mitchell’s medical clout. “I understand,” she told him confidently, “you are the first authority on nervous diseases. . . . There is something the matter with my head. No one here knows or believes or cares. . . .
But you will know.” She deferred to and depended on his status and knowl-
edge as her physician.26
In contrast, Gilman presented herself in the letter as one beholden to him and in need of his expertise. “Excuse me if I write unnessary [ sic] facts,” she offered in the first paragraph, “it is through ignorance.” She ended the letter by saying, “Forgive the length. I know it isn’t what I should have written but I can’t do better now. . . . I am all alone in the house or I couldn’t write this. People tire me frightfully. I’m running down like a clock—could go one
[ sic] scribbling now indefinitely—but the letters don’t come right.” An apologetic Gilman openly confessed her intellectual weaknesses. She was an aspir-
ing author— “an artist of sufficient merit to earn an easy living when well.”
Nonetheless, she acknowledged that the letter “isn’t what I should have writ-
196 / Chapter 9
Figure 9.2. Charlotte Perkins Stetson [Gilman]’s letter to
S. Weir Mitchell (Zona Gale Papers, Wisconsin His tori cal
Society, Madison, WI, WHI- 33389; used by permission)
ten,” disparaging her words as “scribbling.” At the end—the final line be-
fore her signature, which sounds a great deal like the narrator in “The Yellow Wall- Paper”—she revealed that she cannot even form the letters themselves.27
Yet even as she maligned her own account, Gilman asserted its authority
and her entitlement to offer it. She indicated her familiarity with current medical theory. And she presumed to know what kinds of information Mitchell
would need to collect in order to evaluate her case; she proposed to participate in the diagnostic process and implied that without her input Mitchell would
conduct a “mere casual examination.”28 Gilman also seemed to be aware that
Tuttle / 197
she was not authorized to tell that story—hence the rhetorical manipulation
positioning her as beholden to his expertise and higher status. If Mitchell did indeed dismiss her overture as “self- conceit,” he was simply concurring with her on this point.
This letter, then, is centrally about the question of who has the authority
to craft the narrative of Gilman’s illness. Who was authorized to speak about the state of her body and her mind? Her letter to Mitchell not only bears witness to this struggle but also illuminates something important about the story that Gilman eventually published about her rest- cure experience. Although
I generally concur with Knight’s assertion that the letter does not “substan-
tially change . . . our reading of Gilman,” it does suggest to me that we might read her story “The Yellow Wall- Paper,” written three years later, as another attempt at writing her case history.29 Denied the right to write an account of her case in a medical context, she articulated it in fiction, which was seen as a legitimate venue for women in the 1890s and which allowed her the license
to express herself through figurative means.
This dynamic has an explicit parallel in the story itself, in which the nervous narrator, being given something similar to a rest cure by her doctor- husband, is told that she should not write or think about her “condition,” that he is
the doctor and he knows all about it already. So instead, she says, “I will talk about the house.” And what she does when talking about the house—something that as a woman she would have been authorized to speak about—is to describe, metaphorically, her imprisonment within a domestic role and to
detail the progressive insanity it causes. Just as Gilman used the culturally ac-ceptable medium of fiction to detail her “case,” the narrator couches her own discussion of her condition in the nonthreatening language of domesticity.30
In her letter to Mitchell, Gilman highlighted her own position as the pa-
tient, but she also asserted the importance of the patient’s knowledge of her own case and proposed the kind of cooperative doctor- patient relationship
that is only today beginning to attain legitimacy in allopathic medicine.31
This letter showcases her struggle to assert herself amid the constraints of the doctor- patient dynamic and Victorian gender ideology. It also lends weight
to a reading of her best- known work of short fiction in which the story functions as a case history from the female patient’s point of view. Whereas critics have long read the story itself as an indictment of the silencing and objectification of women who are denied bodily self- determination, the recently re-
covered letter to Mitchell illuminates an important dimension of “The Yellow
Wall- Paper” and, even more significant, of Gilman’s own biographical experi-
ence. The letter is evidenc
e of her complex negotiation of medical discourse
as well as her shrewd manipulation of rhetorical conventions (this time, of an epistolary nature) to accomplish her goals. It also invites us to consider the
198 / Chapter 9
degree to which such power dynamics haunt the medical encounter or other-
wise shape women’s health issues in our own time.
Today the US medical profession, though not yet sufficiently integrated
by sex (let alone other demographic factors such as race and socioeconomic
background), is no longer such a bastion of male authority. According to the
Ameri can Medical Women’s Association, “the number of women choosing ca-
reers in medicine has grown substantially” in the last century, although “there has not been a commensurate increase in the percentage of women in senior leadership positions.” Likewise, women now seek admission to medi cal
schools in equal numbers with men, but women have not achieved parity in
establishing practices subsequent to that education. In the medical encounter, too, there has been substantial but not sufficient change. Patient- centered decision making is gaining credibility. Susan Scherman has argued that we still need “a feminist ethics of health care” that “examines patient autonomy in
[its] social and po liti cal dimensions” and identifies the gendered power relations that continue to shape female patients’ conversations and relations with health- care professionals.32
In a recent study of women’s health and pub lic policy, Karen Baird cele-
brates the fact that women’s health has now been recognized as a topic wor-
thy of serious attention by policy makers: “by the late 1980s and early ’90s,”
she observes, “calls for women’s rights and equality were no longer consid-
ered to be the anthems of radical women[’s] liberationists; they had become
accepted, legitimate concerns that government needed to address and enforce
when appropriate.”33
If the doctor- patient dyad no longer necessarily functions, as it did so of-
ten in Gilman’s time, to silence women and deny them self- determination,
the same cannot be said for women’s representation in the halls of the very
government, celebrated by Baird, that sets health- care policy. Throughout the period in which Knight and I worked to recover and publish Gilman’s selected letters, we suffered repeated reminders that women’s bodily autonomy
remains imperiled, despite substantial gains. The 1995 Beijing Declaration of the United Nations’ Fourth World Conference on Women did include an
“explicit recognition and reaffirmation” that women’s right “to control all aspects of their health, in particular their own fertility, is basic to their empowerment”; this built on the earlier Convention on the Elimination of All
Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW), which since 1979 had
required signatory states to “take all appropriate measures to eliminate dis-
crimination against women in the field of health care in order to ensure, on
a basis of equality of men and women, access to health care services, in cluding those related to family planning.”34
But the United States has (in)famously refused to join the 189 countries
Tuttle / 199
that, at the date of this writing, have signed on to CEDAW. In 1999 Senator
Jesse Helms “bragged from the Senate floor” that he “did not intend to be
pushed around by discourteous, demanding women” supporting the initia-
tive, whom he’d previously described as “ ‘radical feminists’ with an ‘anti family agenda.’ ” It is significant that one reason for the opposition to CEDAW among Ameri can lawmakers is that it “might be used to encourage equal representation in Wash ing ton, where the US Congress and all executive agencies are
exempt from affirmative action laws.”35
Today, seven years since the Selected Letters were published, the issues raised by Gilman’s letter to Mitchell remain as relevant as ever. Women still of ten lack a place at the table among the shapers of women’s health policy, and their voices are still actively discredited and suppressed. A prominent example is the 2012 hearing of the House Committee on Oversight and Government
Reform on the topic of insurance coverage for contraceptives. No women
were among those impaneled by the committee to decide the issue, “prompt-
ing some women members of Congress to walk out of the hearing in pro-
test.” Senator Patty Murray of Wash ing ton state described the incident as
“like stepping into a time machine and going back 50 years”; echoing Mur-
ray, Senator Jeanne Shaheen of New Hampshire noted that “here we are in
2012 and a House committee would hold a hearing on women’s health and
deny women the ability to share their perspective.” California Senator Barbara Boxer’s grandson said it best, on examining a photograph of the hearing: “It’s all dudes.”36 This was, of course, the hearing at which Sandra Fluke was prevented from testifying; her protests made her the target of self- professed mi-sogynist Rush Limbaugh, who called her a “slut” and a “prostitute” in an ob-
vious attempt to further stifle her voice. “Because it happened in Congress,”
Fluke pronounced in her speech at the Democratic National Convention later
that year, “people noticed. But it happens all the time. Many women are shut
out and silenced” when their bodies and health are at issue.37
What makes Fluke’s example so striking is its very typicality—it does, as
she said, happen all the time. Despite the pub lic outcry over the silencing of women both at this hearing and afterward over Limbaugh’s airwaves, it has
happened again and again. Witness the recent debate over Texas Senate Bill
5, an attempt by lawmakers to curtail women’s constitutional right to termi-
nate a pregnancy safely and legally. “The optics in the room were inescapable,”
noted Katha Pollitt. “Here was a bunch of prosperous and powerful and ut-
terly confident middle- aged white men champing at the bit to tell women,
mostly young and poor, many of color, many already with kids, what they
could do with their bodies.” Ironically, Senator Wendy Davis’s eleven- hour
filibuster of the bill indicated women’s lack of a voice in the senate chamber, a fact expressed by other means when Senator Leticia Van de Putte, whose
200 / Chapter 9
attempts to speak were repeatedly ignored, was forced to ask, “Mr. President, parliamentary inquiry. At what point must a female senator raise her hand or
her voice to be recognized over the male colleagues in the room?”38
Parliamentary procedure such as that used in the Texas Senate is intended
to maintain order and fairness, yet Davis and Van de Putte used sanctioned
rhetorical acts, the filibuster and the parliamentary inquiry, precisely to highlight the lack of fairness in the government’s handling of women’s health is-
sues. Indeed, they did so in part to protest women’s silencing in the decision making on matters that directly affect them on the most visceral level. Unlike Gilman (and the narrator of “The Yellow Wall- Paper”), they had access
to such rhetorical avenues and did not have to resort to “genres traditionally considered to be private or appropriate for females.”39
Yet their assertive and pub lic speech acts point to the same problem high-
lighted by the silencing of Sandra Fluke: women still must struggle for the
right to speak about, let alone maintain full ownership of, their bodies. It is no wonder that Gilman’s work persists as meaningful to feminists and that
her private writing has caught a
nd maintained their attention as well. Recov-
ered documents like Gilman’s letter to Mitchell speak to concerns in our own
time, just as they illuminate the challenges that Gilman faced during her life.
The very fact that women and feminists are still fighting these battles goes a long way to explaining why her life and work remain interesting to contemporary readers.
TRANSNATIONAL GILMAN: TRANSLATION AS RECOVERY
The 2010 Gilman conference in Rome documented “the continued relevance
of Gilman’s vision for contemporary feminisms”—both within and beyond
the United States.40 The increasing interest in Gilman abroad and the con-
comitant proliferation of translations of her work demand that scholars ex-
pand our definition of recovery to accommodate analy sis of these texts as part of the phenomenon. Such analy sis will also help to illuminate “the criti cal role of translation in the formation and transformation of feminist movements
and politics” that is increasingly a concern of feminist translation studies.41
Gilman’s work has been translated into at least thirteen languages: Chinese,
Danish, Dutch, Farsi, French, German, Hebrew, Italian, Japanese, Norwegian,
Spanish, Swedish, and Turkish. Scholars around the world are making signifi-
cant contributions to Gilman studies, some of them inherent in and some en-
abled by these translations. The focus of this final section is the recovery of Gilman’s work in Italy, where feminists have been purposeful and explicit in
employing this work to serve their needs in the present day.
In her own time, of course, Gilman likewise achieved an international au-
Tuttle / 201
dience: four of her nonfiction works were published in translation, along with several of her poems. Women and Economics had the farthest reach, appearing in Dutch, German, Hungarian, Italian, Japanese, Norwegian, Polish, and
Russian; it was also excerpted in Danish. She boasted deservedly in her auto-
biography that her journal the Forerunner had readers “as far afield as India and Australia.” Cynthia Davis notes, “On behalf of women’s rights” Gilman