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Doctoring "The Yellow Wallpaper"

2002; Johns Hopkins University Press; Volume: 69; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/elh.2002.0019

1080-6547

Jane F. Thrailkill,

Mental Health and Psychiatry

In Pat Barker's novel Regeneration (1991), set during the final year of World War I, a neurologist named Dr. Rivers experiments with treating the tics, paralyses, and corporeal contortions of shell-shock victims by asking the damaged soldiers to talk—about their dreams, fears, pasts. Another physician, Dr. Yealland, also treats the newly recognized "psycho-neuroses of war," but he embarks on a different therapeutic regimen: shock treatment, or the application of electricity to the part of the body presenting symptoms. When faced with a British soldier who had emerged physically unscathed from "Mons, the Marne, Aisne, first and second Ypres, Hill 60, Neuve-Chapelle, Loos, Armentières, the Somme and Arras" yet had lost his ability to speak, Yealland straps him to a chair and attaches conducting wires to the tender tissues of his throat. "'Suggestions are not wanted from you; they are not needed,'" the doctor admonishes the agitated patient during a session. "'You must speak, but I shall not listen to anything you have to say.'" 2 It becomes clear that the doctor's thinking is this: either the soldier's muteness had a real somatic source—in which case the electricity would reactivate his vocal organs—or it was a pretence, in which case the painful and humiliating treatment would constitute a form of discipline. Elaine Scarry has written of torture, "The physical pain is so incontestably real that it seems to confer its quality of 'incontestable reality' on that power that has brought it into being." 3 A solution to skepticism, Yealland's treatment also makes irrelevant the question of whether the soldier's debility is fabricated: reality lies in results, and indeed by the end of the session the soldier manages to stammer out a few words. What distinguishes this medical treatment from torture proper is the doctor's indifference to the semantic content of the soldier's verbal expression. Effects, in other words, trump meanings. [End Page 525]