To: Alison Bertolini From: Ann Waskosky Subject: Project Proposal Date: 2 April 2014
The Muse of Madness: Womens Treatment of Illness
Proposal
As an avid reader of short stories in high school, I had taken notice to one specific short story in particular: The Yellow Wallpaper written by Charlotte Perkins Gilman. Through the years of reading novels based on the idea of mental illness, my interest had piqued. In the nineteenth century, mental illness, especially for women, was taboo to speak of and even more proscribed to speak of its treatment. The Yellow Wallpaper is written from the perspective of a women battling with an unnamed mental illness in the nineteenth century. Her cure is to be secluded and shut into her room every day. She writes in a journal as her outlet. By the end of the story, she has gone mad, ripping the wallpaper off of the wall and crawling around in a circle in her room. The treatment for mental illness has changed drastically, but the stigma surrounding illness around women has been slightly altered, though seemingly unchanged. Treatment of mental illness, more specifically with women, will shape much of my research questions and analysis. As a creative writer, I am fascinated with different modes of writing. Writing from the perspective of a woman with mental illness has engrossed the idea for my project. I will be researching the modern styles of treatment for mental illness and foster these remedies into my story. I think utilizing research is useful to the creative component in my project. It gives the project a more personal feel and a sense of personalization.
Objectives
I have three main objectives for my project. First, I will establish clear distinctions between the treatment of womens mental illness in the nineteenth century and present day. I want to see the differences in order to gauge how I will be writing my creative piece. Also, the treatments have changed drastically. It is important to establish how far society has come along with the treatment of womens mental illness as well as how we have not changed enough. Along with distinctions, I will research the ways the treatment for women have not changed and how it is affecting women. The research itself will keep me on check with my information and correctly analyze its data. Second, I will write a creative short story that mirrors The Yellow Wallpaper as well as the novel
Girl, Interrupted. These two pieces of work go hand-in-hand concerning womens mental illness. The Yellow Wallpaper is a great example of the treatment of mental illness in the 19th century. Girl, Interrupted is a model of a more contemporary approach to womens mental illness. They are a strong facet to both my creative writing component as well as my research. Along with these stories, I will give a two page explanation as to why I wrote this story, what the differences are between the two stories, and how I had decided what I was going to write. I will explain why it is relevant to mental illness today versus in the nineteenth century. This will strengthen my writing. I will be writing in a format I am unfamiliar with and I can use personal experiences to complete my story. Being able to analyze the constructing process will deepen my passion for writing. Lastly, I will analyze The Yellow Wallpaper through the lens of illness studies. This will be the research portion of my project. Along with illness studies, it will pair with the feminist lens in my analysis. The research I plan on conducting will give me a clear understanding of how the treatment of womens mental illness has changed and how it has affected women from the 19th century to present day. Nancy Theriot argues the role of womens roles in family and society in the 19th century were determined by female reproductive functions. This idea conjured a type of taboo towards women with mental illness. I will use this theory to expand my research. Using her idea as a building block of how they thought of mental illness, it will propel my ideas on its treatment. As for today, it is interesting to see that according to Jayashri Kulkarni, the definition of womens mental health is still unclear. Weisman states that the narrowest interpretation is the study of those disorders that only women can experience, such as post-natal depression. Because these disorders are gender specific but the awareness has become more apparent, there are new approaches to assisting women with mental illness which is what I will be focusing on.
Methods
My project will consist of a few entities. First, I will have a literary analysis of the text The Yellow Wallpaper. I will be using the lens of illness studies. I will utilize the research that Ive done to explain the psychological impairment that certain treatments on women have had for their mental illness. Theriots theory of womens treatment of mental illness in the 19th century will be a focal point. I will use research of mental illness and its stigma along with analyses of The Yellow Wallpaper through feminist and illness studies lenses. I will use plenty of library resources, along with online research. Second, I will write a creative short story. The short story will be based on the character in The Yellow Wallpaper with similar struggles. The characters in Girl, Interrupted will help frame how my character will treat her illness. It will be in the perspective of the woman and will have elements of oppression and patriarchy. I plan on getting this workshopped by my creative writing class and revising it until I feel it is perfectly applicable to my project.
Timeline
Along with the tentative schedule, you and I had discussed setting up specific meeting times that we may discuss my project in order to fulfill my objectives for the project.
3/9 3/15 3/16 3/22 3/23 3/29 4/6 4/12 4/13 4/19 4/20 4/26 4/27 5/3 5/4 -5/10
Tasks Begin reading from reading list Begin research Proposal signed by mentor DUE Continue reading from reading list Continue researching Work on annotated bibliography Write paper Annotated bibliography DUE Progress report DUE Draft of research paper and abstract DUE Revise research paper Final research paper DUE Present project
Reading List (tentative)
Chouinard, Vera. "Placing The 'Mad Woman': Troubling Cultural Representations Of Being A Woman With Mental Illness In Girl Interrupted." Social & Cultural Geography 10.7 (2009): 791-804.Academic Search Premier. Web. 3 Apr. 2014. Hawkins, Anne Hunsaker. Reconstructing Illness: Studies in Pathography. West Lafayette, IN: Purdue UP, 1993. Print. Hoeller, Hildegard. "Herland And Hisland: Illness And "Health" In The Writings Of Charlotte Perkins Gilman And Theodore Dreiser." Dreiser Studies 34.2 (2003): 24-43.Academic Search Premier. Web. 13 Mar. 2014. Kulkarni, Jayashri. "Special Issues In Managing Long-Term Mental Illness In Women." International Review Of Psychiatry 22.2 (2010): 183-190. Academic Search Premier. Web. 3 Apr. 2014. Theriot, Nancy M. "Negotiating Illness: Doctors, Patients, And Families In The Nineteenth Century." Journal Of The History Of The Behavioral Sciences 37.4 (2001): 349368.Academic Search Premier. Web. 13 Mar. 2014. Treichler, Paula A. "Escaping the Sentence: Diagnosis and Discourse in "The Yellow Wallpaper"" Tulsa Studies in Women's Literature 3.1/2 (1984): 61-77. JSTOR. Web. 12 Mar. 2014.
