Yellow Wallpaper (2022)

Yellow Wallpaper takes its name from Charlotte Perkins Gilman's 1892 short story, a piece of fiction that reads uncomfortably like a case file. Its narrator, an unnamed woman, is confined to a room by her physician husband and prescribed what was then called the rest cure: no writing, no stimulation, as little movement as possible. She is being treated, in theory. In practice, she is being kept still until she stops speaking.

Gilman wrote it after living through the same treatment herself, prescribed by the real Dr. Silas Weir Mitchell, whose rest cure nearly finished her rather than helped her. The story is her account settling that score, and it doubles as something close to a historical record: this is what "care" looked like for a woman diagnosed with hysteria in the 1890s. Confinement dressed up as concern. In the story, the woman's attention narrows onto the room's wallpaper. Its pattern starts to move. She begins to see a figure trapped behind it, trying to get out. Whether this is hallucination or something closer to clarity is left open, which is part of what makes the story hold up. This series works from that same narrowing of attention: what a wall becomes when it's the only wall you're allowed to look at, what a door becomes when you're not permitted through it. Bedsheets, windows, the corners of rooms. Ordinary things that stop being ordinary once they constitute someone's entire field of vision. Some images look for the same kind of quiet transcendence Gilman's narrator reaches for in her hallucinations, when the room seems to offer a way out despite itself. The questions the story raises haven't aged into irrelevance.

Who gets to decide someone is unwell. Who gets believed when they say they aren't. What "treatment" is allowed to look like when the person prescribing it holds all the power in the room. Gilman was writing about her own marriage and her own doctor, but the shape of the problem outlives the specifics. There's also a smaller, more personal thread here: this series was created before Dancing Notes, but has a strong connection to the same core interests. Not only from a personal point of view but also historically, the treatment of Gilman (called the Rest Cure) was a direct precursor to the ‘Working Cure’ applied to the soldiers returning from the European trenches. Yellow Wallpaper is where that interest in how we've tried to treat the mind, and how badly we've sometimes gotten it wrong, started.