The Yellow Wallpaper (1892), by Charlotte Perkins Gilman

by Charlotte perkins gilman (1860-1935)

THEyellow wall-paper (1892)

Luciano Cabral lecturer

Charlotte Perkins Gilman

fictionist, poet, sociologist, feminist, essayst

born Charlotte Anna Perkins, in Hartford, Connecticut, in 1860

Isabella Beecher Hooker

married in 1884birth of Katherine depression

Katherine Beecher

Dr. Silas Weir Mitchell, neurologist

Harriet Beecher Stowe

"rest cure"

before her first marriage, 24 years old, she worked as a governess, art teacher, greeting cards designer, in Providence

suicide

at that time, she wrote poems in defense of women's rights

"Why I Wrote 'The Yellow Wall-Paper'?" (1913)

"solemn advice to 'live as domestic a life as far 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'. This wa in 1887".

"[...] and came so near the border line of utter mental ruin that I could see over".

"The little book is valued by alienists and as a good specimen of one kind of literature".

"It was not intended to drive people crazy, but to save people from being driven crazy, and it worked".

Gilman`s works

Women and Economics(1898)

• a feminist manifesto raises a thesis: "women's economic dependency on men stunts not only the growth of women but that of the whole human species". More particularly, she argues that this dependency has excessively developed the sexual and maternal aspects of women's personalities to the detriment of women's other productive capacities.

Herland (1915)

• "Gilman offers a vision of an all-female society in which caring women raise children (reproduced by parthenogenesis) collectively in a world that is both prosperous and ecologically sound".

• Concerning Children (1900)
• The Home (1904)

"The yellow wall-paper" (1892)

"[...] the narrator probably belongs to the middle class and is unaccustomed to living in a 'mansion'; the house is old and in disrepair (which also foreshadows the gothic aspects of the story); the narrator has a vivid imagination and high intellectual capacity, thus questioning anything that she views as not quite right - in this case, the house itself; there is some serious marital discord, and, although she downplays her husband's response, the narrator resents him for not taking her seriously".

SIEGEL, Jennifer Semple

"The Yellow Wall-Paper"

description of the house: gothic

autodiegetic narrator

description of John: expert

description of her treatment: wrong

3 main characters

description of her room + wallpaper repulsion and attraction

"The Yellow Wall-Paper"

pareidolia

personification of the paper

color

womanor women

eyes

smell

laughter

how can we describe her?

protagonist

• submissive
• very imaginative
• intelligence
• cries easily

Wallpaper woman

• prisoner
• creeps

who is Jane?