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Example research essay topic: Charlotte Perkins Gilman W W Norton Company - 3,083 words

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... specially peculiar. It would require an inspired psychologist to deal successfully with them. And when ordinary fellows like you and me attempt to cope with their idiosyncrasies the results can be bungling. Most women are moody and whimsical. This is some passing whim of your wife, due to some cause or causes which you and I needn't try to fathom.

But will pass happily, over, especially if you let her alone. " Unlike the physician in Gilman's short story or in her life, Chopin's doctor does not advocate the popular rest cure of the time. Instead, he assures Edna's husband that if he ignores his wife's sudden change in behavior it will simply pass. In this brief interchange, Chopin touches on one of the major forces in the social constraint of women. Dr. Mandelet does not suggest that nothing is wrong with Edna nor that her change in attitude might reflect some valid self-discovery or epiphany but merely that whatever it is its cause and its remedy are beyond his expertise and that in all circumstances it could hardly be more than a "passing whim. " Some years later, Sigmund Freud would mirror this sentiment in a letter to Marie Bonaparte, saying: "The great question that has never been answered and which I have not yet been able to answer, despite my thirty years of research into the feminine soul, is 'what does a woman want? '" Like Kate Chopin, Virginia Woolf was a prolific literary figure; like Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Woolf was plagued by male medicine. Born Adeline Virginia Stephens in 1882 just five years before Gilman's diagnosis of melancholia by Dr.

Mitchell, Woolf first attempted suicide thirteen years later after the death of her mother, Julia Duckworth Stephens in 1895. Woolf's life would never be cleared from suspicion of madness. She was examined by numerous doctors beginning in her early teens and warned of the dangers of pursuing her habit of writing and her passion for literature. In 1912 she married critic and essayist Leonard Woolf. In 1913, Woolf suffered a substantial breakdown and again attempted to take her own life. The shadow of insanity lay across her life.

At the insistence of her husband and her physicians (all of them male, of course) Woolf was urged at every available instance to seek rest and avoid physical and intellectual labor. Her physicians included a number of the most prominent psychologists in England. They often touted her moral responsibility to her husband and her friends to prevent her mental illness from encroaching on their lives. She was forbidden to have children, asked to curve her writing and relocated outside her beloved London.

In 1941, she committed suicide by drowning, "resulting from her dread of the coming World War and her fear that she was about to lose her mind and become a burden to her husband [emphasis added], " ending one of the most influential and tortured literary lives of the twentieth century. Woolf immortalized her struggle with the male medicine of her time in many of her novels, letters and her personal journals. In her own words, Woolf desired to "study insanity and suicide, the world seen by the sane and insane side by side. " She accomplished this in her fourth novel, Mrs. Dalloway, published in 1925, which is perhaps her most profound and daunting study of madness. Mrs. Dalloway is the study of the lives of two strangers on an unusually hot day in London in the summer of 1923: Clarrisa Dalloway, the middle-ages wife of an English politician and Septimus Warren Smith a returning solider obsessed with death.

The novel follows the lives of these two characters, radically different on the surface but both suffering from subtle neurosis within. Clarrisa and Smith frequently think of death; both have suffered the tragic loss of close friends in the previous years: Clarissa lost her sister in an accident and Smith; his best friend in the war. Woolf only unites these two at the climax of the novel, when, at Dalloway's dinner party, Smith's physician brings the news of his patient's suicide. It is for Mrs.

Dalloway the most powerful event of the day and abruptly, despite the physical gulf that separated her from Smith she feels "suddenly very like him. " Smith and Clarissa represent doubles, sharing remarkable similarities while on opposite sides of the spectrum of sanity. Throughout the text their love for Shakespeare, their preoccupation with death and a certain ambivalence toward sex binds them together forming the horizontal union of individuals, a theme that would dominate much of Woolf's future work. At the same instance, Woolf distinguishes Mrs. Dalloway and Smith in regards to their respective psychosis. "Clarissa senses in the world a chaos and ugliness that she tries to combat, " remarks author Susan Rubinow Gorsky in her study of Woolf's work simply titled Virginia Woolf. Meanwhile, Smith "sees an ever-changing worldnow beautiful, now disgusting. "In essentials, " continues Gorsky, "the world that created Clarissa and [Smith] is the same; in their reactions and actions Woolf had indeed displayed the 'world' as seen by the sane and the insane. " Biographer and literary critic, Stephen Trombley, contends that the fictions physicians attending to Smith during the course of this novel are composite of Woolf's own doctors during the years immediately preceding the text's publication. In his work, All That Summer She was Mad, Trombley investigates Woolf's tragic life and the impact of her diagnosis on her novels. "In Mrs.

Dalloway Virginia presents a sustained attack on psychiatry as she experienced it. " Trombley examines the significance of Woolf's physicians' use of morality to guilt her into compliance with their various recommendations and rest cures. In these cases, Trombley argues, guilt served as an additional hardship on the patient who "feels he is a burden on his family, that he causes unnecessary expense and that if the doctor can find nothing physically wrong must be either mad or bad. " Similarly, when Smith's physician Holmes can find nothing outwardly wrong with his patient, Smith is left feeling corrupt and diseased. [T]here was no excuse, nothing whatever the matter, except the sin for which human nature had condemned him to death; that he did not feel. He had not cared when Evans was killed he had married his wife without loving her; had seduced her. The verdict of human nature upon such a wretch was death. Again, Trombley notes similarities in Smith's doctor, Sir William, and one of Woolf's own physicians, the eminent Sir George Henry Savage. Savages was reputed to have described the typical sufferer of Neurasthenia, a popular feminine nervous disorder of the late nineteenth century, as: "A woman, generally single, or in some way not in a condition for performing her reproductive function, having suffered from some real or imagined trouble, or having passed through a phase of hypochondriasis of sexual character, and often being a high nervous stock. " Savage sent Woolf to a nursing home in Twickenham during the summer of 1913 after Woolf fell ill during a conference in Keswick.

Smith's physician also recommends rest at a home specially designed for the insane: "It was merely a question of rest, said Sir William; of rest, rest, rest; a long rest in bed. There would be no alternative. It was a question of law. He would lie in bed in a beautiful house in the country. " In light of Woolf's tragic death, one can only contemplate to what extent the author related with her protagonist, Septimus Warren Smith. These authors were not the first to discuss the unequal treatment of women within the sciences of their time. Critics as far back as the late eighteenth century also believed the young and burgeoning sciences of psychology and sociology were responsible for a renewed effort to enforce the subversion of women.

Ailments like hysteria, melancholia, even wandering womb were common diagnoses of women throughout the western world up until even the middle of the last century. Critic and philosopher, Michel Foucault first focused on mental illnesses such as these in 1954 with the publication of Mental Illness and Psychology. Originally this text was a support of such theorists as Freud who had, in his own time, made some of the first significant steps away from the archaic mental health sciences of the 1800 's. However, after its revision in 1962, readers of Foucault noted the dramatic shift in his attitudes toward psychology's checkered past. In this later addition, Foucault focused more specifically on the constructs of mental illness and its role in the sociology of early America.

Like Gilman, Woolf, Chopin and other prominent female authors of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Foucault understood the relation between science and culture particularly in the medical worlds interpretation of the female psyche and the role of women in the society. In his text, Mental Illness and Psychology, Michel Foucault attempts to follow the progression of psychology and mental health as oppressive tools. The first portion of the text focuses on an elaborated history of the clinical mind punctuated with discussion on the dichotomy between organic and inorganic psychology and a working, evolving glossary of pseudo-psychological terms and illnesses. The second portion, added after the texts revision, is concerned with the progressive relationship between psychology, its history and mental illness. Foucault is not interested in solely this interpretation but does spend significant time underscoring psychology's historical growth and expansion with its use as a political methodology designed to force women -- among other ethnic and minority groups -- into positions of definite submission. Foucault argues that mental illness has always been attributed to and interrelated with a terminology of possession.

Ancient texts as early as the Egyptians make abundantly clear the relation of insanity with possession. In this manner, Foucault argues, the victim of many psychological disorders becomes displaced and eventually becomes the perpetrator instead. This discrepancy in central to Foucault's argument. The doctor is not on the side of health, he remarks, possessing all the knowledge about illness; and the patient is not on the side of the illness, ignorant of everything about it. In addition, science and social consciousness have, throughout history, have had difficulty in differentiating sickness of the body with sickness of the mind.

Neither Arabic, medieval, nor even post-Cartesian medicine accepted the distinction between illness of the body and illness of the mind; each pathological form involved man in his totality [emphasis added]. It is these factors -- sentiments about the inter-relation of illness to overall psychology and the belief that the patient is not to be trusted or relied on -- that led more over to the perceptions of illness among nineteenth century medicine and early psychology. Gilman's protagonist suffers from this misunderstanding of illness and its role within as well as without the patient. Woolf's protagonist, Smith, deals with the external factors and affects pushing or pulling him toward a diagnosis of mental illness. Even Edna Pontellier is defined by a definite set of characteristics and aberration of which marks her as significantly sick or ill.

All of these characters suffer from a total and complete lack of control. They are not allowed to hold any belief or faith in their own health and what sentiments they might possess are quickly brushed aside by the brash and controlling decisions of the physicians around them. In addition, the realities of these characters are constantly being conformed to fit the authoritative nature of their physician or husband. They cannot, even for one moment, hold firm to their own beliefs about their health without succumbing to the diagnosis of others. I did write for a while, despite them, Gilman's protagonist writes, "but it does exhaust me a great deal -- having to be sly about it or else meet with heavy opposition.

Foucault would note that Gilman's protagonist is subtly incorporated with her sickness, " that she has become one in the same with that obscure set of symptoms that forced her into this position to begin with. She has become brainwashed to the extent in which her every objection wears the facade of insanity or hysteria. For Foucault, the constructs of psychology revolve around perceptions of madness and insanity. In other words, the very existence of nervous disorders and aberrant behaviors stemming from physiological sources enables the science of psychology to grow and develop.

It is for that reason that madness, over the course of several centuries, has continually been the source of great disruption. Psychology is least likely, as a science, to be concerned with the healing of the mentally infirm or the irradiation of social ideas of madness for it (psychology) receives its most important validation from this form of sickness. Foucault reasons that it was only after cultural fears of possession could be relegated to physical, chemical reactions within the psyche did man become a psychologize species, thus validating the sciences that would follow. It is this complex inter-relationship that is responsible for the growth and maturation of psychology and the ever-changing role of the mental ill. Foucault recognizes the immediate social unit or family of the madman and their relationship toward perceptions of madness. The family is most likely to take issue with the deviate behavior of any of its members for the family, it is supposed, should work as a microcosm of the society at large.

Again, this is particularly true in Gilman's scenario as with the real life of Virginia Woolf. John, the young womans husband, is her primary physician. However, her brother is also a doctor and her sister is her caretaker through much of the story. If anything, the intimacy between patient and doctor (s) helps to further the womans struggles as well as her intense internal dilemma. It is so hard to talk to John about my case, because her is so wise and he loves me so, the narrator continues.

Attacks against her treatment become indistinguishable from personal attacks against her family. For Woolf, the pressure to do right by her family and accept her "condition" was one of the predominate tools used by her physicians to enact her compliance. Foucault acknowledges the role of interment within the effort of psychology to heal the sick in addition to preventing the spread of illness or even the appearance of Unreason. " Such separation occurs in every culture in some form or another. He breaks down such devices into three large categories.

Geographical separation is the removal of infected people from villages and towns, often without their consent. The geographically separated have, in all ages, been victims of institutionalized hospitals where they would most likely live out the remainder of their lives. Material separation and potential separation refer to the removal of persons from open society to the back bedrooms and ancestral halls for the summer. The narrator of Gilman's story is removed from the mainstream society not only to facilitate some muted form of nineteenth century healing but also to remove her hurtful and different element from possibly affect able people. Both Woolf and her fictional character, Smith are treated with the threat of removal and containment.

These characters are separated from a society that does not wish to acknowledge their difference or their insistence for personal, intellectual fulfillment. These elements are deadly to the view of white, male selfhood that has underscored this trauma since the beginning. Their diagnosis is one of containment. Husband, family, mainstream science and psychology, all of these factors urge a form of social containment not to protect these women from the ravishes of the world but to protect society from the potentially dangerous interactions with madness and independence. These works, whether propagated in the form of short stories, dramas, or novels, are of intense meaning, metaphor and are political outcries against the totalitarian efforts of psychology and medicine at the time. Foucault's analysis of madness and its unique role in defining psychology as well as providing the only substantial threat against it underscored the themes presented in these texts.

Together they paint a terribly accurate picture of the use of medicine as a political tool throughout the nineteenth century in this country. However it is important not to forget the plight of millions of men and women who have struggled against the oppression of psychological investigation and treatment. It is not; of course, the fault of science but it uses as a political method for disguising unpopular or radical sentiment under the guise of illness. With careful understanding and reason, we can learn to pass this frightening moment in our history. We can use psychology and medicine not to distribute power or disenfranchise the weak but to heal the sick and help give to them the same freedom we all hold dear. 1. Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Women; With Strictures on Political and Moral Subjects 171 (J.

Johnson, 1988) (1792). 2. Dr. R. Krafft-Ending, Psychopatihia Sexual 399 (Physicians and Surgeons Book Company, 1922). 3.

Sigmund Freud, Psychology of Love (Macmillan Publishing, 1963). 4. Sigmund Freud & Josef Breuer, Studies on Hysteria, (Avon Books, 1966). 5. Sigmund Freud, A General Selection from the Work of Sigmund Freud 243 (John Rickman ed. , Doubleday 1957). 6. Sigmund Freud, Dora: An Analysis of a Case of Hysteria, (Collier Books, 1974). 7. Elaine Showalter, The Female Malady: Women, Madness, and English Culture, 1830 - 1980 (Pantheon, 1985). 8. Thomas S.

Seas, The Myth of Mental Illness 72 (Anchor, 1983). 9. Claire Khan, Passion of the Voice: Hysteria, Narrative and the Figure of the Speaking Woman 23 (John Hopkins University Press, 1995). 10. Charlotte Perkins Gilman, "The Yellow Wallpaper, " in The Norton Anthology of American Literature 670, 656 - 670 (Nina Bay et al. Eds. , W. W. Norton & Company 1979). 11.

Kate Chopin, The Awakening in The Norton Anthology of American Literature 519, 455 - 558 (Nina Bay et al. Eds. , W. W. Norton & Company 1979). 12. Sigmund Freud, Sigmund Freud Life and Work (Ernest Jones, ed. , Doubleday, 1955). 13.

M. H. Abrams, et al. eds. , The Norton Anthology of English Literature (W. W. Norton & Company 1993). 14.

Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway 280 (Harcourt, Brace & World, 1950). 15. Susan Rubinow Gorsky, Virginia Woolf, Revised Edition 58 (Twayne 1989). 16. Stephen Trombley, All That Summer She Was Mad 95 (Continuum 1982). 17. Michel Foucault, Mental Illness and Psychology 65 (University of California Press 1987). Bibliography: See Above


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Research essay sample on Charlotte Perkins Gilman W W Norton Company

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