gmiades
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I love English Class
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Post by gmiades on Nov 19, 2015 22:34:03 GMT
During the Victorian Era, mental illness was a something that was completely looked-over and belittled. The awareness of mental illness was poor to none. This is because people of the 19th Century tended to just ignore those who were mentally ill. The care provided to them was also very unhelpful. An example of this would be Bertha Mason. Once Mr. Rochester realizes she is becoming ill, he stows her away in a gothic mansion that he is never at. Does that sound like a good way to treat someone who is mentally ill? I hope not.
There is also evidence supporting the fact that doctors in the Victorian Era did not know how to treat mental illness correctly. In "The Yellow Wallpaper", the narrator is placed in this dilapidated room in a gothic mansion, which I assume is similar to Thornfield. She is in the process of the rest cure that was created by Silas Weir Mitchell. The rest cure was probably the worst thing any mentally ill person should be doing. An empty mind causes the mind to make itself less empty. This emptiness of though can trigger heavy hallucinations, which were determined as a symptom of mental illness back then.
Before we met her, Bertha Mason was probably a normal person. The reason she went crazy was because of the solitude of women in the 19th Century mixed with the inability to treat her insanity.
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Post by dgarrett on Nov 20, 2015 1:02:33 GMT
I totally agree with you Garrett. As proved in our in class discussions, the best thing to do if you are mentally ill is become more active and more social. However, even though this rest cure is seen as crazy to us today, they definitely viewed it as a normal thing in the 19th century. This was largely due to the belief that women were inferior to men, because, as seen through Bertha and the woman in "The Yellow Wallpaper", women just went along what they were told to, and the men didn't seem to care enough to realize that this needed a different cure.
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Post by morganmassino on Nov 20, 2015 22:08:24 GMT
Great points! Even today mental illness isn't something that is taken very seriously. A mentally ill person is not treated anything like a physically ill person is. Some people don't even believe that there are mental illnesses.
In Jane Eyre and in "The Yellow Wallpaper," the characters who have gone made are women while men are the ones pushing them deeper into a state of insanity. Why do you think this is? Was the patriarchal society so harsh that women went mad or did they become ill for other reasons?
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Post by tmehta on Nov 20, 2015 22:44:52 GMT
Morgan, your question stumped me, and I started to wonder whether men suffer from the same mental illnesses as women do. So I decided just to Google “men mental illness”, and boy did I find a lot.
So according to the American Psychological Association, men are more likely to develop substance abuse and antisocial problems (cough cough Rochester cough cough), while women are more likely to develop anxiety and depression.
And I think society has a lot to do with men’s mental illnesses. Men must be muscular and macho, and being sad, in pain, sick, or scared is seen as feminine behavior by society. So what do men do? They feel pressured to bottle up their emotions, and because they unhealthily cope with these feelings, they end up developing mental health disorders.
And it really isn’t like men don’t suffer from depression and other mental illnesses; apparently, every year, almost 5 million men will experience depression in the U.S. So why don’t we hear about this more often, and why don’t men talk about this more? I found four reasons online:
1. The individual may not recognize his depression symptoms or mistake them for another issue.
2. Some men tend to suppress and mask signs and symptoms.
3. Some men are reluctant to disclose depressive symptoms.
4. Many men resist treatments and avoid diagnosis of male depression.
It’s almost as if men were so caught up in portraying women as these weak and fragile creatures that they forgot that they themselves suffer too. But at least women were allowed to talk about it.
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Zachary Lloyd
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Runnin thru the six with my woes
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Post by Zachary Lloyd on Nov 21, 2015 0:47:49 GMT
Hello all!
I really think there is some substance behind what Tara mentioned about how men are also in danger or rather susceptible to mental illness. So, I have a point we might want to observe:
How does Rochester feel with the weight of a burden (one he created for himself) such as mental discomfort of having Bertha around?
We are all aware of the debilitating things that Rochester does to himself by the end of the novel, but this is a sign of a super-weak emotional state on the verge of collapse under the stress of something. I feel personally that we do not get the whole story all the time from Rochester's POV, seeing as the plot is told from Jane's perspective. Rochester is a brooding but swaggy and confident person, but by the end of the story and after the certain events that transpire, he is seen to be weaker than Jane, for example. I also think, going along with this, that Bronte didn't do this because she wanted to be funny, but instead to highlight an interesting paradoxical claim like the one Tara just made. All in all, I might be wrong, but that is not the point. I really believe if you look at the sort of role reversal the characters have, this fact becomes quite evident.
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pditzler
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I'm here to analyze literature and be a cool kid, and I'm all done being a cool kid.
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Post by pditzler on Nov 21, 2015 15:10:26 GMT
These are all interesting ideas, and I wanted to point out how Mr. Rochester's treatment of Bertha reflects his true character. He knew her real personality somewhat well, having married and spent some time with her. Then, when he decided she wasn't the ideal wife, to avoid divorcing her, he decided eternal confinement for her was the best possible scenario. He had no qualms about her regression into madness, aside from the fact that he was housing a dangerous, unwanted tenant. He would have had a hard time denying that he knew something had changed within her mind, and yet he did nothing to seek treatment for her. Instead he moved onto Jane, whose perspective of him is positive and passionate, which is the only real written perspective readers have of him. Bertha's mental instability and how Mr. Rochester did nothing to help the wife he trafficked from Jamaica really shows a lot about Rochester's other side and about the treatment of mental health at the time. Do you think he would have cared for his wife more had he truly loved her? Or would confinement still have been the "medicine" he used for treating her mental health, like the protagonist's husband did in "The Yellow Wallpaper"?
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Post by danvolpone on Nov 21, 2015 15:19:13 GMT
Going back to Morgan and Tara's points, the reason that women suffer from mental illness and the men push them further could be the men not having an understanding because of the denial of their own mental illnesses. When women had problems, at that time, their husband was supposed to help them. But how could the men correctly help if they could not understand the symptoms of mental illness so much that they would not know if they had it themselves?
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Post by morganmassino on Nov 21, 2015 16:53:15 GMT
Do you think he would have cared for his wife more had he truly loved her? Or would confinement still have been the "medicine" he used for treating her mental health, like the protagonist's husband did in "The Yellow Wallpaper"? That's a very interesting question, Peter. Jane Eyre was published in 1847 and "The Yellow Wallpaper" was published in 1892, and apparently, the rest cure was developed in the 1870's, so it wouldn't have been around in the time that Jane Eyre was written. So, I don't think Rochester would have issued something similar to the rest cure if he had truly loved Bertha. Honestly, I think he would have just pretended that she wasn't ill at all. |
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