The Yellow World: Women, Men and the Rest Cure in Charlotte Perkins Gilmans The Yellow Wallpaper

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The Yellow WorldWomen, Men and the Rest Cure in
Charlotte Perkins Gilmans The Yellow Wallpaper

• Molly Mary McLaughlin

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Charlotte Perkins Gilman and The Yellow
Wallpaper
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S. Weir Mitchell and The Rest Cure
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Wise women choose their doctors and trust them.
The wisest ask the fewest questions. S. Weir
Mitchell, Doctor Patient
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These women had to de?ne themselves to
themselves, often in de?ance of all authority
?gures around them.

• Suzanne Poirier,
• The Weir Mitchell Rest Cure Doctor and
  Patients.

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• They get through, and then the pattern strangles
  them off and turns them upside down, and makes
  their eyes white.
• Charlotte Perkins Gilman, The Yellow Wallpaper

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For those women whose aspirations lay beyond the
domestic life that Mitchell prescribed, the Rest
Cure held deeper, more sinister signi?cance than
the weeks of total dependency. It would force
them to constantly question and reevaluate their
sense of self, and it would brand them forever as
women not in control of their own nature, as
hysterical women.

• Molly Mary McLaughlin