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 Charlotte Perkins Gilman | "This is the woman's century, the first chance for the mother of the world to rise to her full place. . . and the world waits while she powders her nose." —Charlotte Perkins Gilman Gilman was a key figure in the early women's movement—an outspoken advocate of the right to work, socialized child care, and other reforms. Her story "The Yellow Wallpaper" was almost forgotten, out of print for over fifty years before becoming one of the most widely discussed texts in feminist criticism of American literature. |
Charlotte Perkins Gilman was born in Hartford, Connecticut. Her father was the writer Frederick Beecher Perkins, a nephew of reformer-novelist Harriet Beecher Stowe (the author of Uncle Tom's Cabin) and abolitionist minister Henry Ward Beecher. Perkins abandoned the family soon after his daughter's birth. Gilman's mother, Mary Westcott Perkins, worked part-time as a teacher to support her two daughters. Raised in meager surroundings, the young Gilman adopted her intellectual Beecher aunts as role models. As her mother moved from one relation to another, Gilman's early education was neglected. At fifteen, she had only four years of schooling. In 1878 she studied commercial art at the Rhode Island School of Design, and began work designing greeting cards. In her late teens, she decided she never wanted to marry, preferring to devote her life to public service. However, when she was introduced to a handsome young artist, Charles Walter Stetson, she fell in love and was married two years later, in 1884. After the birth of her one daughter, Katharine Beecher Stetson, in 1885, Gilman experienced severe depression for several years. The "rest cure" her doctor prescribed became the basis of her most famous story, "The Yellow Wallpaper." After being treated with the rest cure and suffering a nervous breakdown, she moved with her daughter to California, where she quickly recovered. Her marriage to Stetson ended in an amicable divorce in 1894, and Gilman reluctantly relinquished custody of her daughter to Stetson so she could devote herself completely to her work.
In the early 1890s, Gilman began her career as an advocate for women's rights. A celebrated essayist and public speaker, Gilman became an important early figure in American feminism. "The Yellow Wallpaper" was published in 1892. In This Our World, a book of poetry, was published in 1893. Her influential study Women and Economics (1898), stressed the importance of both sexes having a place in the working world. Woman and Economics was translated into seven languages, and Gilman earned international acclaim as a social reformer.
"The Yellow Wallpaper" is now such a famous short story that it is interesting to recall how recently it was rescued from oblivion. The facts behind the original creation of the tale and its modern rediscovery are worth recounting. Gilman completed the story in 1890 after the breakup of her first marriage. Based on her own experience with depression and the debilitating effects of her medical treatment of the condition, "The Yellow Wallpaper" was written, she later claimed, to "save people from being driven crazy." Gilman sent the story to William Dean Howells, then the most influential critic in American fiction. Admiring it, he sent the story to Horace Scudder, the editor of the Atlantic Monthly, who turned it down on the basis of its stark and unsettling contents. As Howells later commented, it was "too terribly good to be printed" there. The story was eventually published in New England Magazine in 1892, where it stirred up a minor controversy. Howells later reprinted it in his 1920 anthology, The Great American Short Stories. For the next fifty years the story remained out of print.
In 1900, Gilman married her first cousin, George Houghton Gilman. She was a prolific writer, publishing hundreds of stories, poems, and essays, and more than a dozen books during the next thirty-five years. George Gilman died very suddenly in 1934, from a cerebral hemorrhage. Despite inoperable breast cancer, Gilman continued to lecture and write. An advocate of euthanasia, she killed herself with chloroform in 1935, after finishing her autobiography. Although Gilman's work had been praised by influential critics (like William Dean Howells), her fiction had already fallen into obscurity by the time of her death. By mid-century, her critical reputation was so marginal that her name did not even appear in most literary reference works. In 1973, however, a new edition of "The Yellow Wallpaper" appeared with an afterword by Elaine Hedges that claimed Gilman's tale was a small feminist masterpiece—an assertion subsequent critics have endorsed. Six years later, Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar discussed it in their pioneering feminist study, The Madwoman in the Attic (1979). Soon thereafter, "The Yellow Wallpaper" became one of the most widely discussed texts in feminist criticism of American literature. |  Charlotte Perkins Gilman |
Additional Resources: The online Bibliography includes an extended list of writings about Charlotte Perkins Gilman. Continue your Web Explorations by visiting Gilman Links.
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