Girl, Interrupted

In Girl, Interrupted, one of the things I most noticed was female discrimination. I saw it in many places which made me think of "The Yellow Wallpaper" because there are so many of the same themes. The first parallel I saw was when the doctor told Susanna that she needed rest to cure her. This is the infamous "rest cure" still being used in the sixties that we saw in "The Yellow Wallpaper." The interesting thing is that in both the movie and the story, the rest cure is imposed by a man and does not help the patient. In fact, it makes both women go even more insane than they were thought to be before they were admitted into solitude. Another place I saw sexual discrimination is when Susanna's mom is emotional about her daughter's 'borderline personality' and cries in front of the doctor. I saw his discrimination toward her when he looked straight at her and said that this disease tends to run in the family. The fact that he assumed that it would be the mother who passed the tendency on to the daughter rather than the father shows discrimination because this disease was known as a woman's disease.