The Yellow Wallpaper
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Charlotte Perkins Gilman
Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1860-1935) was an American author, feminist, and social reformer. Born in Hartford, Connecticut, Gilman was raised by her mother after her father abandoned his family to poverty. A single mother, Mary Perkins struggled to provide for her son and daughter, frequently enlisting the help of her estranged husband’s aunts, including Harriet Beecher Stowe, the author of Uncle Tom’s Cabin. These early experiences shaped Charlotte’s outlook on gender and society, inspiring numerous written works and a lifetime of activism. Gilman excelled in school as a youth and went on to study at the Rhode Island School of Design where, in 1879, she met a woman named Martha Luther. The two were involved romantically for the next few years until Luther married in 1881. Distraught, Gilman eventually married Charles Walter Stetson, a painter, in 1884, with whom she had one daughter. After Katharine’s birth, Gilman suffered an intense case of post-partum depression, an experience which inspired her landmark story “The Yellow Wallpaper” (1890). Gilman and Stetson divorced in 1894, after which Charlotte moved to California and became active in social reform. Gilman was a pioneer of the American feminist movement and an early advocate for women’s suffrage, divorce, and euthanasia. Her radical beliefs and controversial views on race—Gilman was known to support white supremacist ideologies—nearly consigned her work to history; at the time of her death none of her works remained in print. In the 1970s, however, the rise of second-wave feminism and its influence on literary scholarship revived her reputation, bringing her work back into publication.
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Reviews for The Yellow Wallpaper
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- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The Yellow Wallpaper is a short story by author Charlotte Perkins Gilman. First published in 1892, it has been described variously as gothic, horror, and feminist literature. Gilman, herself, saw it as an indictment of the treatment of women by the medical profession. A woman, who is suffering from depression after the birth of her child, is brought by her husband to an isolated mansion for a ‘rest cure’. She is forbidden any activity including writing. As she sinks slowly into insanity, she becomes obsessed with the yellow wallpaper in one of the rooms. In a very few pages, Perkins manages to convey the treatment of women in the 19th c. not only in terms of mental illness but in their position in the professional as well as domestic life. Most of all, though, The Yellow Wallpaper may be the most chilling depiction of the descent into madness ever written.
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The Yellow Wallpaper - Charlotte Perkins Gilman
Project Gutenberg's The Yellow Wallpaper, by Charlotte Perkins Gilman
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Title: The Yellow Wallpaper
Author: Charlotte Perkins Gilman
Release Date: November 25, 2008 [EBook #1952]
Last Updated: November 5, 2012
Language: English
*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE YELLOW WALLPAPER ***
Produced by An Anonymous Volunteer, and David Widger
THE YELLOW WALLPAPER
By Charlotte Perkins Gilman
It is very seldom that mere ordinary people like John and myself secure ancestral halls for the summer.
A colonial mansion, a hereditary estate, I would say a haunted house, and reach the height of romantic felicity—but that would be asking too much of fate!
Still I will proudly declare that there is something queer about it.
Else, why should it be let so cheaply? And why have stood so long untenanted?
John laughs at me, of course, but one expects that in marriage.
John is practical in the extreme. He has no patience with faith, an intense horror of superstition, and he scoffs openly at any talk of things not to be felt and seen and put down in figures.
John is a physician, and PERHAPS—(I would not say it to a living soul, of course, but this is dead paper and a great relief to my mind)—PERHAPS that is one reason I do not get well faster.
You see he does not believe I am sick!
And what can one do?
If a physician of high standing, and one's own husband, assures friends and relatives that there is really nothing the matter with one but temporary nervous depression—a slight hysterical tendency—what is one to do?
My brother is also a physician, and also of high standing, and he says the same thing.
So I take phosphates or phosphites—whichever it is, and tonics, and journeys, and air, and exercise, and am absolutely forbidden to work
until I am well again.
Personally, I disagree with their ideas.
Personally, I believe that congenial work, with excitement and change, would do me good.
But what is one to do?
I did write for a while in spite of them; but it DOES exhaust me a good deal—having to be so sly about it, or else meet with heavy opposition.
I sometimes fancy that in my condition if I had less opposition and more society and stimulus—but John says the very worst thing I can do is to think about my condition, and I confess it always makes me feel bad.
So I will let it alone