Yellow Wallpaper

Yellow Wallpaper Biography

Much of the life that is reported of Charlotte Perkins Gilman is concerned with her troubled and loveless relationships: with her mother, her father, and her daughter.  These relationships are central to the life of Charlotte Gilman yet only peripherally relate to the incident in her life that sparked one of the greatest pieces of feminist literature ever written.  Ann L. Jane suggests that "The Yellow Wallpaper" is "the best crafted of her fiction: a genuine literary piece . . . the most directly, obviously, self-consciously autobiographical of all her stories" (Introduction xvi).  Today in the twentieth century this statement does not contain the impact that it should for the women of the world who never experienced the suffocating life that Gilman led from 1860 to 1935.  To be able to relate to Gilman's situation and appreciate  “The Yellow Wallpaper” for how it exemplifies women's lives is difficult in this age where women have more freedom than ever before.  Gilman's original intent in writing the story was to gain personal satisfaction from the knowledge that Dr. S. Weir Mitchell might, after reading the story, change his treatment.  But more importantly Gilman says in her article in The Forerunner "It was not intended to drive people crazy, but to save people from being driven crazy, and it worked"

Yellow Wallpaper 

Yellow Wallpaper 

Yellow Wallpaper 

Yellow Wallpaper 

Yellow Wallpaper 

Yellow Wallpaper 

Yellow Wallpaper 

Yellow Wallpaper 

Yellow Wallpaper 

The Yellow Wallpaper

The Yellow Wallpaper