Student ID: xxx
Tutor: xxx
Word Count: 867
Sick Imagination: Disability, Illness and the Critical Medical Humanities
Critical Bibliography: A Review of Literature on Dismissed Female Pain
In this bibliography, I aim to identify the ways in which a range of literature examines the
multifaceted experiences of women’s pain being dismissed and disbelieved. The works I have
chosen include fictional and non-fictional representations of dismissed female pain within the
healthcare system and wider society, tackling issues of female identity, trauma, and resilience
in the face of misunderstood mental and physical illnesses.
Works of Fiction
Gilman, Charlotte Perkins. The Yellow Wallpaper. New England Magazine, 1892.
Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Victorian novella follows an unnamed narrator suffering from
post-partum depression. She is instructed by her physician-husband to isolate herself and
refrain from any physical or intellectual activity, a treatment known as the ‘rest cure’.
Gilman’s employment of unsettling and obsessive language, such as the description of the
wallpaper pattern moving because “the woman behind it shakes it,” creates an image of
imprisonment that reflects the narrator’s own confined pain (Charlotte Perkins Gilman 1892).
The physician-husband, John, acts as a mouthpiece for the medical industry and society in
this period, with his dismissive attitude towards his wife suggesting anything but care.
Gilman’s narrator feels “very much like a child” because of the way John treats her, which
implies how women in pain are often infantilized and not taken seriously (Gilman 1892).
Gilman depicts how the pressure to conceal pain becomes too much to bear, the narrator’s
worsening illness showing how the 19th century rest cure was not only ineffective but
1
Tutor: xxx
Word Count: 867
Sick Imagination: Disability, Illness and the Critical Medical Humanities
Critical Bibliography: A Review of Literature on Dismissed Female Pain
In this bibliography, I aim to identify the ways in which a range of literature examines the
multifaceted experiences of women’s pain being dismissed and disbelieved. The works I have
chosen include fictional and non-fictional representations of dismissed female pain within the
healthcare system and wider society, tackling issues of female identity, trauma, and resilience
in the face of misunderstood mental and physical illnesses.
Works of Fiction
Gilman, Charlotte Perkins. The Yellow Wallpaper. New England Magazine, 1892.
Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Victorian novella follows an unnamed narrator suffering from
post-partum depression. She is instructed by her physician-husband to isolate herself and
refrain from any physical or intellectual activity, a treatment known as the ‘rest cure’.
Gilman’s employment of unsettling and obsessive language, such as the description of the
wallpaper pattern moving because “the woman behind it shakes it,” creates an image of
imprisonment that reflects the narrator’s own confined pain (Charlotte Perkins Gilman 1892).
The physician-husband, John, acts as a mouthpiece for the medical industry and society in
this period, with his dismissive attitude towards his wife suggesting anything but care.
Gilman’s narrator feels “very much like a child” because of the way John treats her, which
implies how women in pain are often infantilized and not taken seriously (Gilman 1892).
Gilman depicts how the pressure to conceal pain becomes too much to bear, the narrator’s
worsening illness showing how the 19th century rest cure was not only ineffective but
1
