The Yellow Wallpaper
Author: Charlotte Perkins Gilman
Charlotte Perkins Gilman was best known in her time as a
crusading journalist and feminist intellectual, a follower of such pioneering
women’s rights advocates as Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and
Harriet Beecher Stowe, Gilman’s great-aunt. Gilman was concerned with political
inequality and social justice in general, but the primary focus of her writing
was the unequal status of women within the institution of marriage. In such
works as Concerning Children (1900), The Home (1904), and Human Work (1904), Gilman argued that
women’s obligation to remain in the domestic sphere robbed them of the
expression of their full powers of creativity and intelligence, while
simultaneously robbing society of women whose abilities suited them for
professional and public life. An essential part of her analysis was that the
traditional power structure of the family made no one happy—not the woman who
was made into an unpaid servant, not the husband who was made into a master,
and not the children who were subject to both. Her most ambitious work, Women and Economics (1898), analyzed the
hidden value of women’s labor within the capitalist economy and argued, as
Gilman did throughout her works, that financial independence for women could
only benefit society as a whole.
Today, Gilman is primarily known for one remarkable
story, “The Yellow Wallpaper,” which was considered almost unprintably shocking
in its time and which unnerves readers to this day. This short work of fiction,
which deals with an unequal marriage and a woman destroyed by her unfulfilled
desire for self-expression, deals with the same concerns and ideas as Gilman’s
nonfiction but in a much more personal mode. Indeed, “The Yellow Wallpaper”
draws heavily on a particularly painful episode in Gilman’s own life.
If you want to get a bit more background for this story,
you may review the article posted on the matter…
Charlotte Perkins Gilman
"Why I Wrote The Yellow Wallpaper" (1913)
Many and many a reader has asked that. When the story first came out, in the New England Magazine about 1891, a Boston physician made protest in The Transcript. Such a story ought not to be written, he said; it was enough to drive anyone mad to read it.
Another physician,
in Kansas I think, wrote to say that it was the best description of incipient
insanity he had ever seen, and--begging my pardon--had I been there?
Now the story of
the story is this:
For many years I
suffered from a severe and continuous nervous breakdown tending to
melancholia--and beyond. During about the third year of this trouble I went, in
devout faith and some faint stir of hope, to a noted specialist in nervous
diseases, the best known in the country. This wise man put me to bed and
applied the rest cure, to which a still-good physique responded so promptly
that he concluded there was nothing much the matter with me, and sent me home
with solemn advice to "live as domestic a life as far as possible,"
to "have but two hours' intellectual life a day," and "never to
touch pen, brush, or pencil again" as long as I lived. This was in 1887.
I went home and
obeyed those directions for some three months, and came so near the borderline
of utter mental ruin that I could see over.
Then, using the remnants
of intelligence that remained, and helped by a wise friend, I cast the noted
specialist's advice to the winds and went to work again--work, the normal life
of every human being; work, in which is joy and growth and service, without
which one is a pauper and a parasite--ultimately recovering some measure of
power.
Being naturally
moved to rejoicing by this narrow escape, I wrote The Yellow Wallpaper,
with its embellishments and additions, to carry out the ideal (I never had
hallucinations or objections to my mural decorations) and sent a copy to the
physician who so nearly drove me mad. He never acknowledged it.
The little book is
valued by alienists and as a good specimen of one kind of literature. It has,
to my knowledge, saved one woman from a similar fate--so terrifying her family
that they let her out into normal activity and she recovered.
But the best
result is this. Many years later I was told that the great specialist had
admitted to friends of his that he had altered his treatment of neurasthenia
since reading The Yellow Wallpaper.
It was not
intended to drive people crazy, but to save people from being driven crazy, and
it worked.
Short Movie
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