Monday
The indispensable Literary Hub had a recent article on Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “Yellow Wallpaper” in which novelist Greer Macallister weighs the advantages of fiction vs. non-fiction. Given that Gilman herself was institutionalized for post-partum psychosis, why would her short story have so much more of an impact than her first-hand accounts of her ”near-catastrophic experience” with physician Silas Weir Mitchell’s so-called “rest cure”?
Macallister admits to some ambivalence here. One the one hand, fiction can present a far more powerful story arc than non-fiction. The seemingly clear and simple “Yellow Wallpaper,” she notes, is masterfully crafted:
Narrator gets terrible advice from her physician husband and brother on how to manage her depression; follows it; loses her grip on sanity. It’s an easy text to teach, and students everywhere can quickly grasp how the narrator’s voice shifts from breezy wit to fully unhinged psychosis, from “It is very seldom that mere ordinary people like John and myself secure ancestral halls for the summer” to “Now why should that man have fainted? But he did, and right across my path by the wall, so that I had to creep over him every time!”
Mcallister worries, however, that fiction might be palliative, cushioning readers against the full unpleasantness of the subject matter. While this may get readers to confront truths they might otherwise avoid, it also supports arguments that literature lies (e.g., Plato). What happens to literature’s boast that it tells the truth through lying if something less than the truth ultimately emerges?
Fiction has the power to change minds. Does it also, by filtering facts through the lens of a created narrative, make unpleasant truths more palatable? Books like Ellen Marie Wiseman’s What She Left Behind and The Address by Fiona Davis draw from the harsh realities of how women were treated in 19th-century asylums, but set these stories in a larger fictional context with a clear, closed arc. It’s possible that many readers will pick up a fictional account more readily, that “something bad happened” is easier to handle than “something bad happened to me.”
As a fiction writer, I appreciate and embrace the ways that fiction blends education and entertainment. Historical novelists are time-travelers, magicians, magpies. Both fiction and nonfiction rise and fall on the selection of telling detail; fiction writers have a lot more freedom in where those details come from and how they fit together to form a cohesive, satisfying narrative.
But there is an authenticity to first-hand accounts that resonates with modern readers, and powerful nonfiction accounts are also on the rise. Susannah Cahalan’s Brain on Fire and Jenny Lawson’s Furiously Happy were New York Times bestsellers, reaching readers with first-hand insight on the experience of diagnosis, treatment, and living with mental illness. Just last month, Esmé Weijun Wang’s The Collected Schizophrenias joined their ranks, debuting on the NYT list at #3. As we honor the right of too-often silenced voices to be heard, and work to destigmatize mental illness, these accounts make particularly powerful tools for empathy.
These are important and difficult questions. I would argue that great fiction has the ability to hone in on essential truths, which can get lost in the extraneous noise of real life. That being said, those interested in an issue like mental illness shouldn’t rely only on novels but look at first-hand accounts as well. Literary scholars do versions of this all the time, setting up an interesting conversation between the author’s work and the author’s life and time.
Macallister concludes her article by describing how “Yellow Wallpaper” had a very specific impact that perhaps could not have been achieved through other kinds of writing:
In a 1913 issue of The Forerunner, she recounted that after going back to work following her institutionalization, she was “naturally moved to rejoicing by this narrow escape,” writing a story about the experience and “sen[ding] a copy to the physician who so nearly drove me mad.” Though Mitchell did not reply to her directly, she heard through the grapevine that “the great specialist had admitted to friends of his that he had altered his treatment of neurasthenia since reading “’The Yellow Wallpaper.’”
She wrote it to change one man’s mind. She succeeded.
“It was not intended to drive people crazy, but to save people from being driven crazy,” said Gilman, “and it worked.”
I do not know how exactly Michell changed. I like to think that, after reading the story, he no longer infantilized his female patients but saw them as collaborators in their cure. In any event, that is one way that therapy has evolved since the story was written.
Great fiction is particularly effective at challenging conventional understanding, what reception theorist Hans Robert Jauss calls an age’s “horizon of expectations.” The “willing suspension of belief” that we give to literature causes us to become complicit with its vision and thus impacts us all the more. Whereas crusading non-fiction may prompt us to throw up resistance, fiction breaches those safeguards. Then, once we are in its thrall, it rewires us.