The Yellow Wall-paper and Other Stories

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Charlotte Perkins Gilman was America's leading feminist intellectual of the early twentieth century. The Yellow Wallpaper and Other Stories makes available the fullest selection ever printed of her short fiction, featuring the pioneering feminist masterpiece of the title, her stories contemporary with The Yellow Wallpaper, the fiction from her neglected California period (1890-95), and her later explorations of "the woman of fifty." Together, these impressive works throw new light on Gilman as a writer of fiction.

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3 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars Writing Lessons: Charlotte Perkins Gilman gives a master class in horror and irony, October 31, 2009
ByTerry Mathews (a small town in east Texas) (TOP 1000 REVIEWER)
(REAL NAME)
This review is from: The Yellow Wall-paper and Other Stories (Oxford World's Classics) (Paperback)
Even though I majored in English and took several short story courses, I had never heard of Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1860-1935) until a Labor Day weekend road trip.I caught an audio version of "The Yellow Wall-Paper," her most famous short story, on XM's Book Radio just outside Texarkana.Written in 1890, the story revolves around a young woman who is obviously suffering from postpartum depression. Her physician husband, the baby and her sister-in-law take a summer lease on a large house in the country so the new mother can recover.The story is told solely from the woman's point of view which is, in the beginning, cheery and full of hope, even though she must be cautious because her husband frowns on her putting her thoughts in a journal - "He hates for me to write a word.""It is very seldom that mere ordinary people like John and myself secure ancestral hall 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."The husband believes there is nothing the matter with his wife, other than "temporary nervous depression."While the sister-in-law and baby take rooms downstairs, the narrator and her husband are secluded in an upstairs bedroom with "the worse [wall] paper ... one of those sprawling flamboyant patterns committing every artistic sin. ... The color is repellent, almost revolting; a smoldering unclean yellow ... lurid orange in some places, a sickly sulphur tint in others."The wall-paper (as Gilman spells it) becomes the young wife's obsession as she sinks deeper and deeper into depression."But there is something else about that paper - the smell! ... It creeps all over the house. I find it hovering in the dining room, skulking in the parlor, hiding in the hall, lying in wait for me on the stairs. ... It used to disturb me at first. I thought seriously of burning the house - to reach the smell."Although the story is only 19 pages long, it is at once terrifying and educational.It's educational because it gives the reader a glimpse into the restrictions put on women in that era.They were thought of as fragile and prone to nervous conditions. They weren't allowed to work or think for themselves, really. They were expected to bow to their husband's wishes and devote themselves solely to their domestic lives. There was no outlet for their creativity and talent, save their home, husband and offspring.Clearly, the young woman in Gilman's story had thoughts of her own and she wanted to develop her writing skills, even though her overprotective husband discouraged her at every turn.The young woman's final descent into madness is as frightening as anything Stephen King has put on paper. And Gilman did it in 1890.Irony and gothic themes almost drip from the pages of the rest of Gilman's stories, especially in "The Unnatural Mother," written in 1895, which details a town's disdain for a woman who dares to live outside the lines of proper, conventional mores."A Surplus Woman," written in 1916, details the devastation in England after World War I. With so many of the men dead or disabled, it fell to the women to pool their resources to bring the country back and to help widows and "surplus" (unmarried) women survive.After reading Gilman's biography in the front of The Oxford World Classic edition, it's clear that Gilman herself experienced periods of depression and frustration with society's rules. She was the niece of Harriet Beecher Stowe ("Uncle Tom's Cabin"), Catherine Beecher and Isabel Beecher, "three of the most influential American reformers of the nineteenth century."Although she married and had a child, she chafed under the constrictions of conventional marriage and frequently left her home in the East and headed to California where she enjoyed a freer lifestyle.She also divorced her first husband, married a distant cousin, and earned money as a writer, literary magazine editor and lecturer later in life.After her husband died and she was diagnosed with inoperable cancer, she took her own life, making her own rules until the very end.In "The Yellow Wall-Paper," Charlotte Perkins Gilman writes a horrific tale of madness and mayhem without any special effects, save her tremendous talent.



4 of 8 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars A Woman Beyond Her Time, February 27, 2004
By A Customer
This review is from: The Yellow Wallpaper and Other Stories (World's Classics) (Paperback)
The Yellow Wallpaper and Other Short Stories by Charlotte Perkins Gilman is a book truly ahead of it's time. From reading the stories it is apparent that Charlotte was an extreme feminist for the late 1800s. I found it interesting that a woman in the 1800s was so aware of the confinements imposed on women during that time. It was very clear to me that Charlotte Perkins Gilman was on a mission to educate as many woman as she could regarding the inequality of rights for women versus men. The main reason I found this book so intriguing was not because of her writing technique but her strong desire to help women realize that they were more capable than society gave them credit for. She was clearly trying to strengthen herself and other women. I appreciated her writing more for the books contribution to the empowerment of women. It was truly courageous of Charlotte to express as much as she did in her writings since it was uncommon for women to stand up for themselves and their rights. Charlottes writing was motivational and inspired many woman to eventually step out of their "limitations and boundaries" at the time and become more assertive about their rights.



0 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars A Review by Dr. Joseph Suglia, October 31, 2009
ByDr. Joseph Suglia "The Greatest Author in the...
This review is from: The Yellow Wall-paper and Other Stories (Oxford World's Classics) (Paperback)
In 1887, Charlotte Perkins Gilman was committed to a sanitarium in Pennsylvania run by one Dr. S. Weir Mitchell, the popularizer of a cure for female hysteria. Every female hysteric, according to Mitchell, should be placed under the watchful supervision of a (male) physician. He must oversee the strict regimentation of her body's habits. Such vigilant monitoring is a conditio sine qua non for any physician who wishes to cure the patient of her malady. She must submit unquestioningly to the physician's will and obey all of his prescriptions-one of which, invariably, is the injunction to do nothing. Bed rest is compulsory and should be vigorously enforced. The patient is to be placed in a state of perpetual invalidism; all forms of activity to which she is accustomed must be invalidated. Above all, she must not write. Five years later, Gilman published the novella, The Yellow Wallpaper, a slightly veiled polemic against Weir Mitchell (the physician is even mentioned explicitly in the text) and the "cure" to female depression and hysteria that he advocated. The narrative is written from the perspective of a woman who undergoes a nervous breakdown. What we are reading is her diary, which charts her gradual mental deterioration. The narrator and her husband/physician, John, have rented an ancestral house for a summer. John prescribes for the narrator a "rest cure" that is clearly indebted to the teachings of Weir Mitchell. She is prohibited from writing; she writes nonetheless, perhaps to spite him. Isolated in her room and completely inactive except for her writing, the narrator becomes transfixed by the sickeningly grotesque wallpaper that surrounds her. She projects her self into the convoluted patterns of the paper and imagines a feminine figure-not necessarily a "woman," but rather a "shape... like a woman" [39]-entangled in the radiating network of fronds and vines. The feminine shape escapes from the wallpaper's intricate web and is seen "creeping up and down" in the "dark grape arbors" [45] of the courtyard. In the final scene of the work, the narrator, who has seemingly lost her mind, tears off the wallpaper and crawls and "creeps" "smoothly" [50] across the floor and over John, who has collapsed lifelessly after seeing his wife wriggling and writhing on the ground. Since all of this is composed in the present tense, apparently she is writing as she is creeping. Two orders of writing are figured in the novella. On the one hand, there is the language of the yellow wallpaper, which spreads its sprawling patterns, its fecundating, fungoid forms, all over the room in which the narrator is confined-this is clearly representative of the language of medicine and maleness. On the other hand, there is the ideolect of the female narrator, who frees herself by writing in defiance of her husband's orders. Writing is here figured as a mode of activity-which, for Mitchell, is a quintessentially male practice (women who are active, according to Mitchell, ape men). Little known in the century in which it was written, The Yellow Wallpaper was rediscovered in the late twentieth century and has become what is easily one of the most "over-interpreted" works of fiction in the last few decades. Most interpreters have pointed to the novella as a figuration of female liberation in modernist fiction. Despite its seeming simplicity, they invariably point to the text's so-called "ambiguities" and "contradictions," the most glaring of which is the manner in which the novella ends; most seem to believe that the novella ends complicatedly and equivocally. Does the narrator, in fact, achieve liberation Or does she not John, it is often said, faints to the floor, and fainting, as everyone knows, is somehow "feminine." Therefore, the narrator has perhaps achieved a "victory" over John. (One should also call attention to the fact that John is referred to, in the final scene, as "that man" [50], his proper name having been replaced by a demonstrative pronoun and a common noun.) And yet the narrator is also reduced, at the close of the novella, to the status of a worm or a snake, crawling and creeping across the floor along a self-ordained path. She certainly seems to have "precipitated" into what is usually described as "madness"-a "madness" that is attributed not to her "imaginative power and habit of story-making" [34], but rather to her husband's profession. Her progressive "improve[-ment]" [43] has resulted in a regressive deterioration. Because of this central ambiguity between "positive" and "negative" meanings, the novella seems, at once, a celebratory and affirmative "portrayal" of female liberation from a constraining, male-dominated order and an elegiac, despairing cri de coeur that proclaims the seeming impossibility of liberation from tyrannical maleness. The notion that this is an interesting "ambiguity" or "contradiction" escapes this reader. Far richer literary works of art were produced during the same period in which The Yellow Wallpaper was written. Virginia Woolf, Gertrude Stein, and Djuana Barnes are only a few examples of female writers whose work is far more provocative and complex than that of Charlotte Perkins Gilman. No one with a shred of rationality would deny that The Yellow Wallpaper has a didactic character; and, with the exception of a few trite "ambiguities," its meanings are almost completely self-explanatory. The simplicity of the work may explain the multiplication of critical discourses that it has generated. Dr. Joseph Suglia





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