Intro. to Charlotte Perkins Gilman
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- Charlotte Perkins Gilman was an American feminist author and activist born in 1860 in Connecticut. She was abandoned by her father at birth and raised by her emotionally distant single mother. - After marrying at age 23 and giving birth, she experienced severe postpartum depression for which her doctor prescribed the "rest cure" of isolation, leading her to write her famous short story "The Yellow Wallpaper." - Gilman went on to write numerous works promoting women's causes and feminism, including the utopian novels Herland and Moving the Mountain, as well as the nonfiction books Women and Economics and The Man-Made World. She advocated for feminist ideals and greater independence for women.
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Intro. to Charlotte Perkins Gilman
- 2. The Norton Anthology of American Literature, 8th Edition | Copyright © 2012 W.W. Norton & Company Charlotte Perkins Gilman
- 3. The Norton Anthology of American Literature, 8th Edition | Copyright © 2012 W.W. Norton & Company • Born in Hartford, Connecticut, in 1860 • Abandoned by her father at birth and raised by her emotionally distant single mother • Married at age 23, she worried that her duties as wife and mother would interfere with her writing career • Gave birth at age 24; experiences postpartum depression and is prescribed the “rest cure” that leads her to write “The Yellow Wall-paper” Gilman’s Early Life
- 4. The Norton Anthology of American Literature, 8th Edition | Copyright © 2012 W.W. Norton & Company • Early writings—such as a poem in defense of prostitutes—display a desire to support women’s causes • Nonfiction works include Women and Economics (1898), The Man-Made World (1911), and His Religion and Hers (1923) • Utopian feminist novels include Moving the Mountain (1911) and Herland (1915) Gilman’s Feminist Activism
- 5. The Norton Anthology of American Literature, 8th Edition | Copyright © 2012 W.W. Norton & Company Gilman’s Feminist Activism
- 6. The Norton Anthology of American Literature, 8th Edition | Copyright © 2012 W.W. Norton & Company “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. Else, why should it be let so cheaply? And why have stood so long untenanted? John laughs at me, of course, but one expects that in marriage.” “The Yellow Wall-paper”
- 7. The Norton Anthology of American Literature, 8th Edition | Copyright © 2012 W.W. Norton & Company “The Yellow Wall-paper”
- 8. The Norton Anthology of American Literature, 8th Edition | Copyright © 2012 W.W. Norton & Company “The Yellow Wall-paper”
- 9. The Norton Anthology of American Literature, 8th Edition | Copyright © 2012 W.W. Norton & Company “The Yellow Wall-paper”
- 10. The Norton Anthology of American Literature, 8th Edition | Copyright © 2012 W.W. Norton & Company “But I forgot I could not reach far without anything to stand on! This bed will not move! I tried to lift and push it until I was lame, and then I got so angry I bit off a little piece at one corner—but it hurt my teeth. Then I peeled off all the paper I could reach standing on the floor. It sticks horribly and the pattern just enjoys it! All those strangled heads and bulbous eyes and waddling fungus growths just shriek with derision!” “The Yellow Wall-paper”
- 11. The Norton Anthology of American Literature, 8th Edition | Copyright © 2012 W.W. Norton & Company She walketh veiled and sleeping, For she knoweth not her power; She obeyeth but the pleading Of her heart, and the high leading Of her soul, unto this hour. Slow advancing, halting, creeping, Comes the Woman to the hour!– She walketh veiled and sleeping, For she knoweth not her power. “She Walketh Veiled and Sleeping”
- 12. The Norton Anthology of American Literature, 8th Edition | Copyright © 2012 W.W. Norton & Company • In a sestina, the same six words appear at the end of each line, but in a different order every stanza • Why did Gilman choose these six particular words? – homes – peace – life – love – care – world “To the Indifferent Women”
- 13. The Norton Anthology of American Literature, 8th Edition | Copyright © 2012 W.W. Norton & Company • Marion Marroner: “In her reserved, superior, Boston-bred life, she had never dreamed that it would be possible for her to feel so many things at once, and with such trampling intensity.” • Gerta Peterson: “a tall, rosy-cheeked baby; rich womanhood without, helpless infancy within.” “Turned”
- 14. The Norton Anthology of American Literature, 8th Edition | Copyright © 2012 W.W. Norton & Company “Through the wide doorway there came in to him two women. One like a tall Madonna, bearing a baby in her arms. Marion, calm, steady, definitely impersonal, nothing but a clean pallor to hint of inner stress. Gerta, holding the child as a bulwark, with a new intelligence in her face, and her blue, adoring eyes fixed on her friend—not upon him. He looked from one to the other dumbly. And the woman who had been his wife asked quietly: ‘What have you to say to us?’ ” “Turned” Launch Inter
- 15. Visit the StudySpace at: http://wwnorton.com/studyspace For more learning resources, please visit the StudySpace site for The Norton Anthology of American Literature. This concludes the Lecture PowerPoint presentation for Charlotte Perkins Gilman
Editor's Notes
- Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1860–1935), writer and women's rights advocate, addressing members of the Federation of Women's Clubs, June 4, 1916. As the introduction to Volume D of NAAL explains, the post–Civil War period was a time when the impulse towards literary realism led to the development of “the literature of argument,” a body of sociological literature that argued eloquently for the reform of social ills, as well as a body of literary texts with a strong reform agenda of their own. Few writers more neatly capture the “literature of argument” than Charlotte Perkins Gilman, who wrote both nonfiction treatises and fiction novels, all of which advocated for the rights of women.
- The story of Gilman’s early life can feel a tad melodramatic—abandoned by her father at birth and raised by a single mother who deliberately distances herself from her children in hopes of preventing any future disillusionment they may feel when personal relationships fail them—but it also sheds light on her burgeoning feminist activism and her career-long goal of creating a better world in which women could live and work. A defining moment in Gilman’s early life as both a feminist activist and fiction writer came soon after the birth of her first child—a daughter—when she was suffering from postpartum depression (a condition not widely understood) and prescribed a “rest cure” that confined her to her bedroom for several weeks and discouraged her from pursuing intellectual activity. Gilman wrote “The Yellow Wall-paper” as a loosely autobiographical response to the treatment she endured for her depression, with the goal of better educating the public regarding women’s mental health. (More on this in subsequent slides.)
- While “The Yellow Wall-paper” is Gilman’s most well-known contribution to American literature, she is also the author of many nonfiction works of feminist prose. Her 1898 work, Women and Economics, argued that “women’s economic dependency on men stunts not only the growth of women but that of the whole human species. More particularly, she argued that because of the dependency of women on men for food and shelter the sexual and maternal aspects of their personalities had been developed excessively and to the detriment of their other productive capacities” (NAAL 791). The book was an immediate success and profoundly influenced feminist thought at the turn of the century. Other works, such as The Man-Made World (1911) and His Religion and Hers (1923), argued for increasing women’s role in politics and religion, respectively. While her nonfiction works argued against the patriarchal structures that limited women’s opportunities, her fiction often imagined a female-centered world, as did the utopian novel Herland (1915), which “offers a vision of an all-female society in which caring women raise children (preproduced by parthenogenesis) collectively in a world that is both prosperous and ecologically sound” (NAAL 791).
- Women’s rights activists, such as the women in this photograph shown advocating for women’s suffrage, were an important—if often maligned—segment of turn-of-the-century American political life. Gilman was an influential theorist and activist for women’s rights.
- Like Chopin’s The Awakening, “The Yellow Wall-paper” shows us a woman caught in materially and financially “comfortable,” yet lethal, domestic circumstances, a woman who, like Edna, struggles for some kind of self-discovery and affirmation in a context that seems perfect not only for keeping her confined but also for confounding her ability to think clearly about herself. Because “The Yellow Wall-paper” is a story about confinement, madness, and fate, what happens if we compare this story to Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher” and Henry James’s “The Beast in the Jungle?” Does “The Yellow Wall-paper” rate as a gothic tale of horror? If so, what is the relationship between the genre of the gothic and feminist activism? Why does Gilman use this genre to put forward her feminist agenda? Look at the opening lines of the story in particular (as reproduced on this slide) to analyze how Gilman set up the story as equally feminist and gothic.
- Much of the dramatic irony in “The Yellow Wall-Paper” functions because we, as readers, are aware of the narrator’s mental illness but she is not. Gilman’s story is an outgrowth of the nineteenth-century medial profession’s struggle to understand women’s emotional states. Physicians often prescribed counterproductive measures such as the “rest cure”—isolation to one’s bedroom when the patient actually needed exercise, human contact, and intellectual stimulation—for women suffering from postpartum depression. This image depicts “involuntary blepharospasm,” a neurological disorder affecting the muscles around the eyes, from Nouvelle Iconographie de la Salpetriere by Professor Jean Martin Charcot (1825–1893), published in Paris in 1889. Books such as this were dedicated to understanding the mysteries of women’s emotional states. “The Yellow Wall-paper,” in many ways, is a response to such books.
- This is the physician and novelist S. Weir Mitchell, the man who prescribed the “rest cure” for Gilman that went on to inspire “The Yellow Wall-paper.” Mitchell was “the most famous American neurologist of the day [and] a specialist in women’s ‘nervous’ disorders” (NAAL 790). Fifteen years after publishing her short story, Gilman wrote in “Why I Wrote ‘The Yellow Wall-paper’” that the doctor “sent me home with the solemn advice to ‘live as domestic a life as . . . possible,’ to ‘have but two hours’ intellectual life a day,’ and ‘never to touch pen, brush, or pencil again’ as long as I lived.” Gilman writes that following the doctor’s advice brought her “so near the borderline of utter mental ruin that I could see over.” She concluded her essay, “It [‘The Yellow Wall-paper’] was not intended to drive people crazy, but to save them from being driven crazy.”
- Pictured here is the Bloomingdale Asylum for the Insane in New York. Gilman herself received treatment at a sanitarium in Philadelphia.
- Much of what happens in “The Yellow Wall-paper” is interior, hallucinatory. Even so, can we see this narrative as an experiment in realism? How does a passage such as the one that appears on this slide work as an example of literary realism? What other passages in the story work both as realism and as psychological fantasy?
- How does the imagery of “She Walketh Veiled and Sleeping” recall that of “The Yellow Wall-paper”? What similarities are there in the image of a woman “Slow advancing, halting, creeping” between the poem and the story? How does this poem treat that image differently? To help your students answer this question, you can discuss the third-person perspective of the poem—the speaker in the poem is not the “creeping” woman herself, but is someone who observes the woman and is aware of her power in a way that the woman herself is not. Is this about a specific woman? Is it a metaphor for the women’s movement and women’s “awakening” (there’s that image from Chopin, again) from second-class citizenship?
- “To the Indifferent Women” is a sestina, a verse form wherein the same six words appear at the end of each line, but in a different order every stanza. When a poet writes a sestina, the poet must carefully choose these words to make sure that their repetition provides a positive impact on the reader. Why did Gilman choose these six particular words? Do the words take on a different meaning throughout the poem as they are repeated in different contexts? What do the words mean in the first stanza? What do they mean by the final stanza? Which specific lines and stanzas transform the meanings of those words?
- Around the turn of the twentieth century, middle-class homes across the country were sustained by immigrant “girls” from Ireland, Sweden, Norway, Italy, and elsewhere in Europe. “Turned” gives us a look at the relationship between a middle-class woman (Marion Marroner) and her immigrant domestic (Gerta). Both women suffer, albeit in different ways, from sexual exploitation. As you discuss the story with your students, ask them if they think that the women are being depicted as victims, or if Gilman presents them as having grown from their experiences. Contrasting the earliest depictions of the characters with those that appear at the end of the story (as this and the subsequent slide will help you to do) will help your students to answer this question.
- How are the women of “Turned” depicted differently here at the end of the story? Some of the details are small and subtle (the main character is now “Marion” and not “Mrs. Marroner”), while others are more overt (Gerta is described as having “a new intelligence in her face”). Other details—such as characterizing Gerta as “a tall Madonna”—will require your students to think about the allusions that Gilman is making. Ultimately, your goal is to help your students understand the journey that Gilman has taken these women through and the transformations that they experience.