Charlotte Perkins Gilman: life and literary work

Charlotte Perkins Gilman

One of the most expressive pieces of fiction to address the issue of the place of the female artist in a society that generally represses woman is the short story "The Yellow Wallpaper" by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, and the relationship between the need for artistic expression and the ability to support oneself is evident in that story. Charlotte Perkins Gilman wrote this story over a period of years, from 1890 to 1894, and she would later refer to these as the hardest years of her life. She had a nervous breakdown and left her first husband and child to live alone in California. During this period, she also started to give lectures on freedom for women and socialism. She kept a boardinghouse, taught school, and edited newspapers. Her husband married her best friend, and Gilman relinquished her child to them. The tone of the story can be attributed to the difficulties and tensions in her own life, and it is possible to read this story as a projection of her own fears and concerns onto her protagonist.

The protagonist is a woman who has been confined to bed after giving birth and who feels more and more imprisoned by her life, seeing her husband and his sister as her jailers, and identifying with the yellow wallpaper in which she sees a vision she only slowly comes to see as a vision of herself and her existence. The story has added power derived from the relationship between the protagonist and the author, who experienced similar revelations about her own life and who also found herself tested psychologically by her situation.

Mary Jacobus finds that the story reflects not only aspects of Gilman's life but her method of "reading" a situation, just as it uses the protagonist to represent the act of literary criticism in a pathological form:

If Gilman creates a literary double for herself in the domestic confinement of her hysterical narrator, her narrator too engages in a fantastic form of re-presentation... Just as we read the text, so she reads the patterns on the wallpaper; and like Freud she finds that "it is difficult to attribute too much sense to them." Hers is a case of hysterical over-)reading. Lost in the text, she finds her own madness written there. (Jacobus 231)

This is a further link between the character and the author.

Gilman was a noted lecturer on the role of women in society and wrote the book Women and Economics, arguing "that sexual and maternal roles of women have been over emphasized to the detriment of their social and economical potential, and that only economic independence could bring true freedom" (di Grazia para. 3). Gilman herself was a socialist with unconventional views. She struggled in her own life with memories of her childhood desertion and with poverty and recurring depression ("Charlotte (Anna) Perkins Gilman (1860-1935)" paras. 1-5), and this links her directly with her main character in this story. Her socialism also links her with this character, for she creates a woman here who is dependent on her brother for a livelihood and who, as a consequence, has nowhere else to go. Gilman herself held that human beings have a need to produce and to create, as she wrote n her book Women and Economics. This might seem a work far removed from the story told in "The Yellow Wallpaper," but it is not -- this is a woman driven mad by the role society gives her, a role that does not encourage her to produce and that allows others to control her life. This was the plight of women in the nineteenth century, a plight Gilman understood well.

Gilman's own life was more difficult in some ways than that of her characters, at least as it is revealed in the story, for Gilman's parents were not the best role models for her:

Her father abandoned the family when she was young, leaving her to lead a life of poverty and self doubt. Her mother gave her little affection, believing she would never know the pain of rejection if she never experienced love. (Vosberg para. 13)

The clear need her character has for a family and for overt family support, as well as the suspicions that develop in her mind about the others in the house, reflect this sort of youth in many ways.

The enclosed world of the protagonist is a representation of the closed world of the writer, a world carried out largely in the mind of the writer. The protagonist speaks through her journal, her means of artistic expression, and from the beginning it is clear that she is treated as someone who needs to be cared for and protected to the point where she has little choice in her own destiny. Her husband and sister-in-law do not want her to write in her journal at all, believing that it tires her out to think when they are there to think for her. The point-of-view in this story is hers throughout, and it is a point-of-view isolated from other people, directed into a journal, and unrestrained in terms of any need to please other eyes.