Description and Analysis
The
artifact that I have chosen to discuss for my presentation is the miniseries “American
Horror Story: Murder House”. The show centers on a husband, wife and their
teenage daughter who move cross-country to live in a restored mansion, unaware
that its former occupants haunt the home. The reason for uprooting their family
is Ben, the husband, is caught cheating by his wife Vivian, who then suffers a
miscarriage. This show aired from October 5th through December 21st,
2011. The show’s main storyline takes place present day, but the former
inhabitant’s stories are told in flashback, all they way to 1922 when the house
was built. The two clips I closely relate to today’s readings, “The “Sick”
Women of the Upper Classes” and “The “Sickening” Women of the Working Class.
The
readings by Barbara Ehrenreich and Dierdre English, address how upper-middle class
women were treated by their doctors and husbands in comparison to their
working-class counterparts based on their gender and social class. Any ailment
or disorder found in affluent women at the time were traced back their sexual
organs or to “the inherent defectiveness of female physiology”. In the first
clip, a male gynecologist is examining Vivian. This takes place some time after
her miscarriage and the doctor is offering a new hormone that will make her
body able to conceive again. Vivian is skeptical and when she asks for the side
effects, the doctor tries to sell her on it by using female age stereotypes and
describing how taking this drug will “make you feel 10 years younger”. In the
clip, I see the gynecologist as a salesman almost and treating his practice
like a business trying to sell his “customers” on ways to keep them coming back
for more visits. In the reading, the same method was used when treating
upper-middle class women. They would be required treatment that would last a
very long time and unless it was “corrected” by a drastic surgery, it kept the
necessity for frequent medical attention. Upper middle-class women had “the
domineering and indulgent physician”, while the working-class women had the
Public Health Officer. Working class women were often grouped together with
prostitutes and were all considered sickening. At the time, the spread disease
was thought to be stemming from the working class.
Whatever
social class women were in, their bodies were under the authority of men. In
the second clip, Vivian’s maid, Moira, explains how not much has changed in the
way men use their authority over women. In the “Sick” reading, the treatment
used by doctors, instilled a “morbid cult of hypochondria” that really made
women believe that they were weak also made them more dependent on their
husbands, not only financially, but to help them seek treatment. In this clip,
Vivian is feeling defeated and feels like she is in fact going “crazy”.
Discussion Questions
1) In the first clip, the gynecologist says
to Vivian: “Your body is like a house. You can fix the tiles
in the bathroom and kitchen, but if the foundation is decaying you’ll be
wasting your time.” How does this comparison demonstrate the view medical
professionals had towards the bodies of “sick” upper-class women? And how might have a woman’s
miscarriage been portrayed during the early nineteenth century?
2) In “The “Sick” Women of the Upper
Classes, Ehrenreich and English refer to the upper class women as the “ideal
patient”. What factors might attribute to this classification, and what kind of
patient would the working class women be identified as?
3) Moira’s summary to “The Yellow Wallpaper”
by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, is described more as a liberation for the female
character. As Ehrenreich and
English write, “she frees herself from her prison--- into madness”. Do you see this
as a triumph for the empowerment of Gilman’s heroine, or has she been debased
and dehumanized?
4) Do you think the upper-middle class and
working-class women of today are still divided in certain ways when it comes to
social change?
