In the introduction to the copy I received, Gilman was quoted as saying she wrote to “preach … If it is literature, that just happened.” She considered her writing a tool for promoting her politics, and herself a one-woman propaganda machine. Nor did she consider her work literature. In 1973, the Feminist Press released a chapbook of “The Yellow Wall-Paper,” with an afterword by Hedges, who called it “a small literary masterpiece” and Gilman “one of the most commanding feminists of her time” though Gilman never saw herself as a feminist (in fact, from her letters: “I abominate being called a feminist”). Gilman is best known for “The Yellow Wall-Paper” now, due to Elaine Ryan Hedges, scholar and founding member of the National Women’s Studies Association, who resurrected Gilman from obscurity. “Similar Cases” was considered to be among “the best satirical verses of modern times” (American author Floyd Dell). Another, “A Conservative,” describes Gilman as a kind of cracked Darwinian in her garden, screaming at a confused, crying baby butterfly. The well-loved “Similar Cases” describes prehistoric animals bragging about what animals they will evolve into, while their friends mock them for their hubris. ” During her lifetime, Gilman was instead known for her politics, and gained popularity with a series of satirical poems featuring animals. “The Yellow Wall-Paper” was not iconic during its own time, and was initially rejected, in 1892, by Atlantic Monthly editor Horace Scudder, with this note: “I could not forgive myself if I made others as miserable as I have made myself. Gilman was clearly disgusted with her experience, and her disgust is palpable. Virginia Woolf, Edith Wharton, and Jane Addams all took the cure, which could last for weeks, sometimes months.
Mitchell administered this cure of extended bed rest and isolation to intellectual, active white women of high social standing. Silas Weir Mitchell, late-nineteenth-century physician to the stars.
The story is based on Gilman’s experiences with Dr. Reading “The Yellow Wall-Paper” felt like a mix of voyeurism and recognition, morphing into horror.
The unnamed first-person narrator goes through a mental dance I knew well-the circularity and claustrophobia of an increasing depression, the sinking feeling that something wasn’t being told straight. The rest cure caused the illness it claimed to eliminate. She thinks she’s a creature who has emerged from the wallpaper. On the last day of the treatment, the narrator is completely mad. I loved the unnerving, sarcastic tone, the creepy ending, the clarity of its critique of the popular nineteenth-century “rest cure”-essentially an extended time-out for depressed women. When I first read “The Yellow Wall-Paper” years ago, before I knew anything about its author, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, I loved it.
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