"A Slight Hysterical Tendency": Performing Diagnosis in Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s ‘The Yellow Wallpaper

In the beginning of Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s short story “The Yellow Wallpaper”(1892), the unnamed female protagonist writes disobediently in her journal: “If a physician of high standing, and one’s own husband, assures friends and relatives that there is really nothing the matter with one but temporary nervous depression—a slight hysterical tendency—what is one to do?” 1 Gilman famously wrote this semi-autobiographical short story to criticize her doctor, Silas Weir Mitchell. Mitchell diagnosed Gilman with hysteria and treated her with his famous “rest cure”—a treatment that kept women confined to their beds, restricting their bodily and mental freedoms. Gilman then wrote the “Yellow Wallpaper”, featuring a narrator who similarly was put on the rest cure. Insistent that she is ill—but with something more than a “slight hysterical tendency”, a diagnosis which she seems to find unsatisfactory—the narrator of Gilman’s story hints at a question that dominates her experience in the text.“What is one to do” with diagnosis, its consequences and its fallibility?

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