SOURCE: Golden, Catherine. “‘Overwriting’ the Rest Cure: Charlotte Perkins Gilman's Literary Escape from S. Weir Mitchell's Fictionalization of Women.” In Critical Essays on Charlotte Perkins Gilman, edited by Joanne B. Karpinski, pp. 144-58. New York: G. K. Hall & Co., 1992.

In the following essay, Golden discusses the writings of novelist and doctor S. Weir Mitchell, on whom the doctor in “The Yellow Wallpaper” is based. Golden demonstrates the ways in which “The Yellow Wallpaper” provides a feminist counter-discourse to nineteenth-century patriarchal medical discourse.

In 1887 S. Weir Mitchell treated Charlotte Perkins Gilman (then Stetson)¹ for a nervous breakdown following a postpartum depression and forbade her to write.² A specialist in women's nervous disorders, Mitchell attended well-known male and female literary figures. George Meredith and Walt Whitman apparently experienced no ill effects from his prescriptions; Jane Addams, Edith Wharton, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, and Virginia Woolf suffered from his Rest Cure treatment...