I offer some information regarding Victorian corsetry and "female invalidism" that may be relevant to our discussions of "Yellow Wallpaper." One source, a 1910 medical text by Robert L. Dickinson entitled Toleration of the Corset, cites a number of corset deformities, including fat pad displacement, hip creases, and unnatural elongation. While the illustrations are explicit, the theories of measurement (corrective, neutral, harmful) are interesting in themselves, and echo some physiological concerns with corsetry or tight lacing of outfits, including hysteria (although there is no definitive link between corsetry and hysteria).
A search in Godey's Lady's Book "corset" points to advertisements and articles about more comfortable alternatives to bone stays and tight lacing, beginning in the 1890s. And an etymology of hysteria (although cin the Oxford English Dictionary shows that, at least until the seventeenth century, the term tended to refer to its classical root, or to the Greek "hystera" (uterus). By the nineteenth century, medical diagnoses for hysteria began to include men.
In their critical commentary, Gilbert and Gubar contextualize late 19th-century social custom as "train[ing women] in renunciation" rather than in appropriation, growth, or development. Since the 1892 publication of Gilman's "Yellow Wallpaper," the main character's dis-ease has been attributed to several things, including post-partum depression, nervous disorder, and agoraphobia (fear of crowds). Of course, none of these diagnoses has an explicit origin in social customs like corsetry, although Gilman does allude to several customary misdiagnoses of her condition in "Why I Write 'The Yellow Wallpaper'."
-Prof. Graban
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