About the Author:
Born: July 3, 1860 (Hartford, Connecticut) Died: August 17, 1935 (Pasadena, California) Published "The Yellow Wallpaper" in 1892 Writer and Social Activist Charlotte Perkins Gilman had a less than fortunate childhood. Her father left her mother alone to raise two young children. As a result, the family made a number of different moves in order to deal with their situation, and Charlotte's education suffered greatly from it. Charlotte married for the first time to Charles Stetson in 1884. While married, they had a child named Katherine together. During her first marriage, Charlotte suffered from a form of depression that would probably be known today as postpartum depression. This condition was not identified and therefore, undiagnosed at the time. It was shortly after her depression that she wrote "The Yellow Wallpaper." The story was mainly a response to a doctor who had told her that she suffered from hysteria and recommended that she "live as domestic as possible" to cure her condition. She sent a copy to the doctor, who never replied. Charlotte realized later how close her recommended "cure" brought her to complete mental deterioration. She wrote "The Yellow Wallpaper" to bring awareness to the excessive diagnosis of hysteria and insanity in women of her time period. She later became quite the feminist and women's rights activist after the experience. Charlotte married a second time to her cousin, George Gilman. Marriage to cousins was not uncommon during this time period. She stayed married to George until his death in 1934. She committed suicide in 1935 as a result of the news of her diagnosis of inoperable breast cancer. Click the link to view the full text of the story:
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About the Text:
Published: 1892 Length: 6,000 word short story Significance: Early work of Feminist literature Point of View: First Person Narrator Form: Collection of Journal Entries "The Yellow Wallpaper" is a story comprised of a series of journal entries written by a narrator that Charlotte Perkins Gilman created. Charlotte admitted that the narrator's experience was based on her own experience with depression. The story is about a narrator who has recently given birth to a child. She is suffering from postpartum depression, but is misdiagnosed. She and her husband have just moved into a country house with their child. Even moving to the new house and having a great new life cannot make the narrator happy. She continues to suffer from her depression. The narrator is seen by the town's physician, who is highly regarded by the community and her husband, who is also a physician. The doctor describes the narrator as suffering from hysteria and a temporary nervous depression. His recommended treatment is that she spend a lot of time on bed rest and live as domestic a life as she possibly could, meaning only being a good wife and mother. It was recommended that she discontinue her writing career and focus on her domestic responsibilities in order to rid herself of her medical condition. The narrator tries to continue writing at first, but her husband prohibits her from it. She finds a way to hide her writing from him and continues to write when he is not present. Soon, her isolation in the room with the yellow wallpaper (which just happened to resemble a nursery) begins to driver her actually insane. She loses touch with reality and her sense of time and space. She begins to see a woman that moves around within the wallpaper and crawls around the room and even onto the ceiling. The narrator even begins to see the woman as a reflection of herself and begins to wonder if she is seeing the woman or herself in the wallpaper. During her last entry, the narrator's husband enters the room to find her creeping and crawling around. She exclaims "I've got out at last!" Her husband is so shocked that he faints, and the narrator continues on, crawling over his body. |