Reflections on our discussion of The Yellow Wallpaper: World Mental Health Day
This weekend, in anticipation of World Mental Health Day, which is today, our community listened to The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins-Gilman, and had a wonderful discussion over on Instagram.
The Yellow Wallpaper is about a woman suffering from what we might today call post-partum depression, and her doctor (who also happens to be her husband) prescribes the “rest cure”. She lies in bed, alone, forbidden from doing any creative activity, and slowly goes stir crazy.
We discussed a lot, from the book covers, society’s dismissive "cheer up" attitude, wanting to get better, connotations of yellow, gender roles, modern experiences with doctors (for mental and physical health), having doctors in the family, inanimate objects, eugenics, and much more.
Nitika, who was facilitating the discussion, particularly liked a point made about mental health being discussed more openly in the media in recent years, but there not being much influential change in the medical world.
As always, our guide notes – in this case, from PhD candidate Amy Stewart – gave our listeners plenty to think about and discuss, including Perkins-Gilman’s other writing…
The Audrey team is feeling very grateful for how this community has developed into such an inviting space where people feel safe enough to share such personal and thoughtful stuff with us and one another online. And it just proves our long-held view that books are the best prompts for good conversation!
If this sounds kind of up-your-street, we’ve got two more events coming up soon. One is our listen-along of A Study in Scarlet by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, starting on October 16th! You can sign up to that now.
The other is another short story weekender, which will be some Edgar Allan Poe, in harmony with the season 🎃 Watch this space (or the instagram space, which might be more informative) for another newsletter about that one…