Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow

Wallpaper”Medicalization, Madness, Marriage and

Maternity in the 19th Century

http://www.chatterboxtheater.org/node/15

Today

biographical notes

post-partum depression/S. Weir Mitchell’s rest cure

feminist theorist/attitudes towards sexuality

discussion of story

Gilman circa. 1900

Charlotte Perkins Gilman, 1860—1935

economist, theorist, author of over 200 short stories and ten novels

refused to call herself a feminist: her goal as a humanist was to campaign for women’s rights

utopian socialismhttp://www.wsu.edu/~campbelld/amlit/gilman.html

Breakdown after birth of child; divorced and left child with father

second marriage happy

an advocate of the right to die; died by her own hand when diagnosed with inoperable breast cancer. She wrote, "when one is assured of unavoidable and imminent death, it is the simplest of human rights to choose a quick and easy death in place of a slow and horrible one."

http://web.cortland.edu/gilman/

This article originally appeared in the October 1913 issue of The Forerunner.

briefly describes her own experience

“work [is] the normal life of every human being; work, in which is joy and growth and service, without which one is a pauper and a parasite”

Charlotte Perkins Gilman, "Why I Wrote The Yellow Wallpaper" (1913)

Period of change: from the “True Woman” to the “New Woman”

Gilman felt that the maternal role over-emphasized, and that women needed economic independence

Women’s role

“Contrasting ‘sex parasitism, in which the female is dependent upon the economic activities of the male,’ with what she identifies as male parasitism in lower life forms, the American feminist [Gilman] emphasizes how the sexual parasitism of women directly contradicts any known biological model.”

Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar (literary critics), No Man’s Land (Vol. 2, 71),

quoting Gilman from her essay “Parasitism and Civilised Vice” (1931)

“The Yellow Wallpaper”

The New England Magazine 11.5 (1892)

http://cdl.library.cornell.edu/

Dramatizations

http://www.tccd.edu/neutral/DivisionDepartmentPage.asp?menu=3&pagekey=464

http://www.musicassociatesofamerica.com/madamina/1993/wallpaper.html

http://www.strangertheatre.ca/home/pastshows.html

Scene from The Yellow Wallpaper directed by Emma Akwafo at Reading University, 2008

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zdIWpw14Fms

Juliet Landau as Charlotte Weiland in The Yellow Wallpaper (2009)

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0790788/

Leone and MacDonald, Drawing from “The Yellow Wallpaper”

http://www.cooper.edu/art/exhibitions/stung/leoart.html

Artwork

Keat Teoh, “The Yellow Wallpaper”

http://keat.teoh.googlepages.com/arts

1. How do the descriptions of the former nursery contribute to our understanding of the story? How about the setting more generally?

2. How would you describe the point of view and the narrative voice? How do they shape the story?

3. What do we learn about John? How do we learn it? What is the significance of his being a physician?

For discussion

4. What do we learn about their relationship? How do we learn it?

5. Anything interesting about the use of names in the story?

6. What does the wallpaper represent?

7. Is she mad? Or has she found a way to be sane?

http://www.dantesheart.com/Issue2/YellowWallpaper.html