Charlotte P. Gilman and why she wrote the “The Yellow Wall-Paper”. Gilman was born in 1860 to a well-known family in Providence, Rhode Island. Her father was Fredrick Perkins, a published writer of short stories and a compiler of a reference book known as “The Best Reading” and her mother Mary Perkins. Charlotte’s childhood would be a great influence as to why she started writing. Her relationships would also play a role in the stories she wrote and how she was a women’s right activist. And the depression that she went through throughout her life. All of these influences leading up to her story “The Yellow Wall-Paper” which essentially is an autobiography with certain details changed.
When Charlotte and her brother were still young there father left the family, leaving their mother to take care of them. Often times cases like this where one of the parent figures leaves will put a strain on the family and also the children. These problems will be carried on the next psychological development stage and so on until the problem is addressed and fixed. For the case of Charlotte, her father leaving made her mother tougher towards them by acting as a male figure. Due to an absence of the father they lived in poor conditions, having to ask for help from relatives.
One of which was her aunt, Harriet Beecher Stowe a famed novelist. This is when she began to love reading and all sorts of genres. One of her favorite would have been fiction because of her vivid imagination; however her mother would later forbid her to read fiction novels. That would change again because her mother would start reading those novels and would find themselves reading to each other. Because of her joy for reading, Charlotte was a very intellectual...
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... her freedom back like in her story when she killed herself. Gilman wrote this story to show the people of her time, mainly women about what she experienced during the “rest cure” and how women should stand up for their rights so they could live as equal to men. Gilman eventually did kill herself; in 1935 she committed suicide by chloroform. It was her choice, in that I mean she kept true to her ambitions and did what she wanted, dying a free woman.
Works Cited
Davis, Cynthia J. “CHARLOTTE PERKINS GILMAN A Biography.” Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 2010. Print.
Horowitz, Helen Lefkowitz, “Wild Unrest Charlotte Perkins Gilman and the Making of ‘The Yellow Wall-Paper.” Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press, 2010. Print.
Johnson, Greg. “Gilman’s Gothic Allegory: Rage and Redemption In ‘The Yellow Wallpaper.” 26.4 (1989): 521-530. Web
Gilman's female narrator, who either chose not to fight this tradition or was unable to do so, loses her sanity at the hands of an oppressive male-dominated American society. The narrator feels certain that the "rest cure" prescribed by her doctor is not working. She says that the men in her life are wrong to limit her activity. She feels that she could escape her depression if given the chance. "Personally, I disagree with their ideas. I believe that congenial work, with excitement and change, would do me good."1 But despite this knowledge, the narrator does not act out against what she believes to be the incorrect ideas of the men who confine her and make her mental illness worse. Her growing insanity is inspired by and represented in the wallpaper of the story's title.
Gilman, Charlotte Perkins. "The Yellow Wallpaper." The Norton Anthology of American Literature. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2007. 1684-1695.
... the liberation of women everywhere. One can easily recognize, however, that times were not always so generous as now, and different women found their own ways of dealing with their individual situations. Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s character created a twisted image of the world in her mind, and eventually became mentally insane. While most cases were not so extreme, this character was imperative in creating a realization of such a serious situation.
Gilman, Charlotte Perkins. "The Yellow Wall-paper." The Norton Anthology of American Literature. Eds. Nina Baym, et. al. Shorter 5th ed. New York, London: W.W. Norton & Company, 1999: 1656-1669.
Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s short story, “The Yellow Wall-Paper”, is a first-person narrative written in the style of a journal. It takes place during the nineteenth century and depicts the narrator’s time in a temporary home her husband has taken her to in hopes of providing a place to rest and recover from her “nervous depression”. Throughout the story, the narrator’s “nervous condition” worsens. She begins to obsess over the yellow wallpaper in her room to the point of insanity. She imagines a woman trapped within the patterns of the paper and spends her time watching and trying to free her. Gilman uses various literary elements throughout this piece, such as irony and symbolism, to portray it’s central themes of restrictive social norms
Shumaker, Conrad. "'Too Terribly Good to Be Printed': Charlotte Gilman's 'The Yellow Wallpaper'." Journal of American Literature 57.4 (1985): 588-599.
Gilman, Charlotte Perkins. "The Yellow Wallpaper." The Norton Introduction To Literature. Eds. Jerome Beaty and J. Paul Hunter. 7th Ed. New York, Norton, 1998. 2: 630-642.
...ble to see that it actually incorporates themes of women’s rights. Gilman mainly used the setting to support her themes. This short story was written in 1892, at that time, there was only one women's suffrage law. Now, because of many determinant feminists, speakers, teachers, and writers, the women’s rights movement has grown increasing large and is still in progress today. This quite recent movement took over more then a century to grant women the rights they deserve to allow them to be seen as equals to men. This story was a creative and moving way to really show how life may have been as a woman in the nineteenth century.
Shumaker, Conrad. "Too Terribly Good to Be Printed: Charlotte Gilman's 'The Yellow Wallpaper'." reprinted in Twentieth-Century Literary Criticism Vol. 37. Ed. Paula Kepos. Detroit: Gale Research Inc., 1991. 194-198.
“The Yellow Wallpaper” was a groundbreaking piece for its time. It not only expressed feministic views through the defiance of a male but also discussed mental illness and the inefficacy of medical treatment at the time. This fictional piece questioned and challenged the submissive role forced upon women of the 19th century and disclosed some of the mental struggles one might go through during this time of questing. Gilman shows however that even in the most horrific struggle to overcome male dominance, it is possible. She herself escapes which again shows a feminist empowerment to end the
After learning of Gilman’s life, and by reading her commentary and other works, one can readily see that The Yellow Wallpaper has a definite agenda in it's quasi-autobiographical style. As revealed in Elaine Hedges’ forward from the Heath Anthology of American Literature, Gilman had a distressed life, because of the choices she had made which disrupted common conventions—from her ‘abandonment’ of her child to her amicable divorce (Lauter 799). Her childhood is described notably by Ann Lane as an introduction to the 1979 publication of ‘Herland’, one of Gilman’s most notable novels.
Kessler, Carol Parley. "Charlotte Perkins Gilman 1860 -1935." Modem American Women Writers. Ed. Elaine Showalter, et al. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1991. 155 -169.
Gilman, Charlotte Perkins. “The Yellow Wallpaper.” Booth, Alison and Kelly J. Mays, eds. The Norton Introduction to Literature. 10th ed. New York: Norton, 2010. 354-65. Print.
The woman behind this work of literature portrays the role of women in the society during that period of time. "The Yellow Wallpaper" written by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, is a well written story describing a woman who suffers from insanity and how she struggles to express her own thoughts and feelings. The author uses her own experience to criticize male domination of women during the nineteenth century. Although the story was written fifty years ago, "The Yellow Wallpaper" still brings a clear message how powerless women were during that time.
"Charlotte Perkins Gilman's "The Yellow Wall-paper"—Writing Women." EDSITEment: The Best of the Humanities on the Web. Web. 05 Mar. 2011.