the rest cure
I know I make a point of saying indoor animal will never be self-help content, but I feel like breaking my own rule on this Friday (which I aim to gaslight you all into believing is a Thursday since I didn't get this out yesterday).
My major at the University of Pittsburgh was English Writing with a focus on short fiction. I remember many of the short stories I read while matriculating and will likely drop a few here over time. One of the ones that comes back to me often is The Yellow Wall-Paper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman from 1892. In the Gothic tale, the narrator has been prescribed the "rest cure," which as of the 1800s – and per Dr. S. Weir Mitchell – consisted of bed rest, strict isolation from stimulating company, a fatty diet of heavy creams and the like, and a ban on all creative and intellectual activities. (Ed. note: Sounds like Pitt!) After weeks of the cure, and weeks spent in one room, she shares her many thoughts on the wallpaper:
On a pattern like this, by daylight, there is a lack of sequence, a defiance of law, that is a constant irritant to a normal mind.
The color is hideous enough, and unreliable enough, and infuriating enough, but the pattern is torturing.
You think you have mastered it, but just as you get well underway in following, it turns a back-somersault and there you are. It slaps you in the face, knocks you down, and tramples upon you. It is like a bad dream.
The outside pattern is a florid arabesque, reminding one of a fungus. If you can imagine a toadstool in joints, an interminable string of toadstools, budding and sprouting in endless convolutions – why, that is something like it.
That is, sometimes!
There is one marked peculiarity about this paper, a thing nobody seems to notice but myself, and that is that it changes as the light changes.
When the sun shoots in through the east window – I always watch for that first long, straight ray – it changes so quickly that I never can quite believe it.
That is why I watch it always.
By moonlight – the moon shines in all night when there is a moon – I wouldn't know it was the same paper.
At night in any kind of light, in twilight, candlelight, lamplight, and worst of all by moonlight, it becomes bars! The outside pattern I mean, and the woman behind it is as plain as can be.
A fairly glowing review for the rest cure if I may say so myself. I mean, if the decor in your own bedchamber lacks any stimulation, maybe try staring at the walls for a few weeks and seeing what happens. Doctor's orders!
By story's end, the narrator has completely lost her mind – "I wonder if they all come out of that wall-paper as I did? – but that doesn't mean that the rest cure can't benefit you in 2025!
So much has been written about The Yellow Wallpaper and what it may and may not symbolize about health, society, and feminism that I'm going to take the easy way out and just not go any further into it. I simply want to highlight that staring closely at yellow wallpaper and writing paragraphs about it counts as looking closely, which is a thing celebrated and endorsed here at ia. Just maybe do it responsibly – like gambling and drinking, as those companies so readily recommend in their advertisements.
indoor animal is curated by a human: Tim Papciak. On Mondays, he shares one link to one music video to help spark creativity in himself and in other creative types. On Thursdays, he recommends a book, movie, show, art piece, or link to some dusty corner of the internet that he believes either 1.) adds to the human experience, or 2.) serves as a coping mechanism in the year 2025. Note: this is not, and never will be, self-help content.