CHARLOTTE PERKINS GILMAN
Charlotte Perkins Gilman was a prominent social critic and feminist writer in the United States of the period from the 1890s through the 1930s. In The Yellow Wallpaper, originally published in 1899, she presents the internal dialogue of a woman diagnosed with hysteria and for whom total rest has been prescribed. In the short fiction, the patient is slowly driven mad by her cure, cut off from any intellectual pursuits whatsoever.
Though The Yellow Wallpaper is a work of fiction, it was based on Gilman's own experience after being diagnosed as an hysteric and prescribed a "rest cure" which prohibited her writing and labeled her feminism and social critique as symptoms of uterine illness. Gilman recovered from her "cure," and went on to write influential social theses, including Women and Economics (1898), and a feminist utopian novel, Herland (1915), which has become a classic of American women's literature.
Questionsto Think About:
1) What was Charlotte Perkins Gilman's incentive to write this story? What goals did she hope it would accomplish?
2) What did hysteria mean, and why were women diagnosed as hysterical? What sorts of behaviors led to a diagnosis of hysteria? What were the common treatments hysterics received?
3) Imbedded within Gilman's story is her critique of the role and place of women in Western cultures. What does Gilman see as the lot of women in her own society? What is the cost to women of being consigned to that lot?
4) Who is the woman behind the yellow wallpaper, who looks out through its bars at the narrator as she sleeps? Why does she creep about the yard and garden at night?
5) Compare "internal" (female) and "external" (male) spaces in the story. What is Gilman saying about each as places for both women and men to live?
6) What is Gilman's view of motherhood as presented in this work?
7) How does this work reflect the challenges to the Cult of Domesticity (see below) put forward by First Wave feminists?
Cult of Domesticity
The Cult of Domesticity (or the Cult of True Womanhood) had its roots in the emerging bourgeois literature of eighteenth-century England: conduct books, religious tracts, and sentimental novels. By the early nineteenth century, the cult had taken hold in the United States, disseminated through novels, religious writings, and advice books written by and for the emerging U.S. urban middle classesû. The cult imposed a highly restrictive series of roles on the new white middle-class woman. To be a True Woman, she must be tender and submissive, self-sacrificing, deeply religious, and untouched by sexual desire. She must be confined to the home, devoted to husband and children, and eschew productive labor and the political arena. African American women, poor women, and immigrant women, compelled by poverty to work, could not be True Women; they and their families were considered unnatural, unfeeling, and sexually depraved.
The restrictions and responsibilities the cult placed upon the middle-class woman put her in a double bind. Required to be sexually ignorant and devoid of sexual desire, she was to spend her life conceiving, bearing, and nursing children. Submissive and dependent, she was still to control her husband's and children's spiritual and sexual behavior.
But the cult also empowered middle-class women. Representing themselves as soldiers in Christ's army against lechery, sin, and injustice, True Women joined moral reform organizations. They campaigned against prostitution, the double standard, intemperance, and espoused radical abolitionism to support their enslaved sisters. Thus the cult could be used to subvert the patriarchal, political, social, and domestic order it sought to erect.
-- Carroll Smith-Rosenberg