The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman

The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman

The Yellow Wallpaper (original title: "The Yellow Wall-paper. A Story") is a 6,000-word short story by the American writer Charlotte Perkins Gilman, first published in January 1892 in The New England Magazine. It is regarded as an important early work of American feminist literature, illustrating attitudes in the 19th century toward women's health, both physical and mental.

Presented in the first person, the story is a collection of journal entries written by a woman whose physician husband (John) has rented an old mansion for the summer. Forgoing other rooms in the house, the couple moves into the upstairs nursery. As a form of treatment, the unnamed woman is forbidden from working, and is encouraged to eat well and get plenty of exercise and air, so she can recuperate from what he calls a "temporary nervous depression - a slight hysterical tendency", a diagnosis common to women in that period. She hides her journal from her husband and his sister the housekeeper, fearful of being reproached for overworking herself. The room's windows are barred to prevent children from climbing through them, and there is a gate across the top of the stairs, though she and her husband have access to the rest of the house and its adjoining estate.

The story depicts the effect of understimulation on the narrator's mental health and her descent into psychosis. With nothing to stimulate her, she becomes obsessed by the pattern and color of the wallpaper. "It is the strangest yellow, that wall-paper It makes me think of all the yellow things I ever saw - not beautiful ones like buttercups, but old foul, bad yellow things. But there is something else about that paper - the smell ... The only thing I can think of that it is like is the color of the paper A yellow smell."

In the end, she imagines there are women creeping around behind the patterns of the wallpaper and comes to believe she is one of them. She locks herself in the room, now the only place she feels safe, refusing to leave when the summer rental is up. "For outside you have to creep on the ground, and everything is green instead of yellow. But here I can creep smoothly on the floor, and my shoulder just fits in that long smooch around the wall, so I cannot lose my way."

Source: Wikipedia

Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1860 - 1935) was born in in Hartford, Connecticut. Her father, Frederic Beecher Perkins, was the grandson of the theologian Lyman Beecher and nephew of Henry Ward Beecher and Harriet Beecher Stowe. Shortly after Charlotte's birth, her father left the family and thereafter provided only small support, thus forcing Charlotte, her mother, and her brother, Thomas, to move frequently over the next several years in search of work and financial help from relatives. After attending the Rhode Island School of Design, Charlotte worked as a governess and as an art teacher.

In 1884, she married her first husband, Charles Walter Stetson, by whom she had her only child, Katharine. Mrs. Stetson, however, could not endure domestic life with an overprotective and patronizing husband, and as a result suffered a nervous breakdown in 1885. Following a separation from her husband (they were divorced in 1894) and a recuperative move to California with her daughter, Charlotte Stetson began to devote herself to women's issues by lecturing and writing. Her powerful short story, The Yellow Wallpaper (1892), based on Mrs. Stetson's own experience, is the tale of a married woman who can escape from her domestic confinement and humiliation only through madness. Charlotte Stetson's feminist writings were influenced by the socialism of Edward Bellamy and the evolutionism of Charles Darwin. In her most influential work, Women and Economics (1898), she argued that the socioeconomic system currently enslaving women was not a natural given but rather a situation that could be rectified by rational and ethical analysis. She criticized the social and economic system that degraded women by relegating them to the status of chattel. The only remedy to this situation was to fit women to be economically independent through a radical reorganization of society based on feminist and socialist principles. Mrs. Stetson's bitingly satirical and profoundly insightful work was an immediate international success; it was praised in the Nation as the most significant utterance on the subject since Mill's Subjectionof Women.

In 1900, Charlotte Stetson married her first cousin, George Houghton Gilman. But she remained resolutely independent, devoting herself to lecturing and writing. From 1909 to 1916, she edited and wrote The Forerunner, a feminist monthly magazine. In her book Man-Made World (1911), Mrs. Gilman described women as essentially peaceful and cooperative, while men were competitive and warlike. Until women claimed their rightful place, destructive male attributes would continue to dominate the world.

Charlotte Perkins Gilman was the leading intellectual of the American women's movement during the early twentieth century. In 1932, Mrs. Gilman was diagnosed with breast cancer. For three years she battled the disease; but once she determined that the cancer was undermining her ability to be useful to society, Mrs. Gilman committed suicide. Charlotte Perkins Gilman's other works include The Home (1903), the novel Herland (1915), His Religion and Hers (1923), and her posthumously published autobiography, The living of Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1935).

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9781680920703
ISBN 10	1680920707
Title	The Yellow Wallpaper
Author	Charlotte Perkins Gilman
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Paperback
Publisher	12th Media Services
Year published	1892-01-01
Number of pages	22
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.