Creepy Crape

The best horror stories have no supernatural monsters in them. Jason could never scare me more than Silence of the Lamb's Buffalo Bill. The Creature From The Black Lagoon could never send shivers down my spine like Black Swan. This is why The Yellow Wallpaper is such a great piece of horror fiction. And speaking of Black Swan, The Yellow Wallpaper is a commentary on how society's strict gender roles frequently shatter the sanity of women.

In Black Swan the insanity came out of the Jungian Madonna/whore duality that Nina is pushed into by the (both figurative and literal) roles she must play. In The Yellow Wallpaper, the narrator isn't given the same exact pressures, but she is given directions that drive her insane all the same. The narrator, suffering from postpartum depression is relegated to the bedroom for rest by her physician husband. Isolated, she loses her mind and starts seeing herself trapped in the wallpaper in the room. While this certainly seems like an insane woman's ramblings, there's almost a weird rationale to it. Wallpaper is merely decorative, and the narrator, being disallowed from working, is merely decorative as well.

It's funny that this patronizing effect still lives on today. In 2005, Tom Cruise expressed his disappointment in an interview about the fact that Brooke Shields used antidepressants to treat her postpartum depression. He suggested she use vitamins. I say, if it worked for Brooke Shields, then Tom Cruise should probably shut the hell up and keep making crappy action movies.

We should also, as a society, examine how our expectations create mental illness in women. Going back to The Black Swan, that pressure we put women on to simultaneously be virginal and sexy is schizophrenic in and of itself. The background of this blog is a portrait of W.E.B. DuBois, because his famous quote of "One ever knows their twoness" resonates with me and I see it being applicable to so much more than the african-american context in which he meant it originally. Women also know this twoness, this pull from two opposite directions at once by one society. And it drives them fucking crazy, so maybe we should stop?