Historical and Literary Contexts
A product of that tumultuous moment
in post-Civil War American society that Mark Twain
and Charles Dudley Warner dubbed the Gilded Age,
Charlotte Perkins Gilman initially established
her claim on public attention by publishing her
witty, feminist polemic Women and Economics
(1898), a work hailed as the Bible of the women's
movement, translated into seven languages and
taught as a college text in the 1920s. In this
work Gilman established the argument, which she
would elaborate and extend throughout her life,
that the economic dependency of women on men not
only retarded their intellectual and emotional
growth, it also arrested the healthy development
of the human species. From that point on, her
life was devoted to attacking what she called
masculinist society and to exploring alternative
social arrangements that would free women from
domestic subordination: day-care centers, kitchenless
houses, and the professionalization of domestic
tasks such as housecleaning, laundry, and sewing.
A passionately committed socialist feminist, she
was deeply influenced by the ideas of Edward Bellamy,
whose 1887 utopian novel Looking Backward
inspired a national political and social reform
movement in his name.
In one sense, "The Yellow Wallpaper"
can be read in the contexts of Gilman's evolving
political beliefs, particularly her fundamental
commitment to radically transforming the social
and economic condition of women. In that regard,
"The Yellow Wallpaper" is a sharp response to
late-nineteenth-century medical practices and
social attitudes about women. First published
in The New England Magazine in 1892 and
later reprinted by William Dean Howells in Great
American Short Stories in 1920, "The Yellow
Wallpaper" has had, in effect, two lives, the
second one launched by the rediscovery and republication
of the story by The Feminist Press in 1973. Since
that time it has achieved the stature of a contemporary
classic and secured a place in the evolving canon
of American literature.
In its own historical moment, the
story received little critical or popular attention
although Gilman sent Dr. Mitchell a copy of the
story to urge him to change his medical practices.
When she learned secondhand that he had altered
his procedures after reading her story, she proclaimed:
"If that is a fact, I have not lived in vain."
Early readers and critics of "The Yellow Wallpaper,"
notably William Dean Howells and Horace Scudder,
the editor of Atlantic Monthly who rejected
the story for publication, read it as a horror
tale, implicitly invoking comparisons with Edgar
Allan Poe and his preoccupation with aberrant
or morbid psychological states.
Since its rediscovery in 1973, however,
some contemporary critics have located "The Yellow
Wallpaper" squarely within a literary tradition
of diaries, letters, fiction, and nonfiction by
leading American feminist thinkers: Elizabeth
Cady Stanton, Sarah Orne Jewett, Jane Addams,
and Gilman's great aunts, Catherine Beecher and
Harriet Beecher Stowe. These are all certainly
figures that Gilman explicitly claimed in her
autobiography as literary ancestors. Other critics
have pointed to important parallels between "The
Yellow Wallpaper" and Kate Chopin's controversial
1899 novel The Awakening, particularly
for their shared frank depiction of the subjugation
and destruction of middle-class wives. Critical
responses to "The Yellow Wallpaper" have traveled
a considerable distance since its publication
in 1892, but the power of the story remains intact.
-James A. Miller
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