Mental health: The Yellow Wallpaper vs. Jane Eyre

By Wild-Bison

I always love getting to the end of a book and then going online to see what everyone else caught. In *Jane Eyre*, Rochester’s first wife is clearly dealing with something serious, and it really looks like it was treated as just “madness” with no real care. Instead of doing anything like sending her somewhere that could actually help, he keeps her up in the attic and doesn’t get her proper professional treatment, even though he’s loaded. People online basically joked that Rochester would’ve handled Jane the same way if she had post-partum depression or was going through menopause. And then you look at *The Yellow Wallpaper* and yeah… the main character gets put on that “rest cure” by her husband for her post-partum depression. It’s kind of shocking how in both stories the husbands end up taking over how their wives handle their mental health. And a bunch of the same stuff shows up again and again: women being repressed and controlled, mental health getting stigmatized, and the whole infantilization thing. I get that these are older books and the gender roles were messed up back then, but still… Rochester’s first wife ends up burning the house down and dying. And in *Yellow Wallpaper* it feels like the woman is driven to the point where she’s basically trapped in her own breakdown and the husband faints when he walks in. Honestly, thank goodness for feminism, because it’s hard not to wonder how much worse it could’ve been for women who didn’t have a voice. Thoughts?