{"id":407,"date":"2015-08-17T09:02:08","date_gmt":"2015-08-17T09:02:08","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.americanyawp.com\/reader\/?page_id=407"},"modified":"2015-08-17T09:02:08","modified_gmt":"2015-08-17T09:02:08","slug":"charlotte-perkins-gilman-why-i-wrote-the-yellow-wallpaper-1913","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/www.americanyawp.com\/reader\/18-industrial-america\/charlotte-perkins-gilman-why-i-wrote-the-yellow-wallpaper-1913\/","title":{"rendered":"Charlotte Perkins Gilman, \u201cWhy I Wrote The Yellow Wallpaper\u201d (1913)"},"content":{"rendered":"

Charlotte Perkins Gilman, \u201cWhy I Wrote\u00a0The Yellow Wallpaper<\/em>\u201d (1913)<\/h2>\n

Charlotte Perkins Gilman won much attention in 1892 for publishing \u201cThe Yellow Wallpaper,\u201d a semi-autobiographical short story dealing with mental health and contemporary social expectations for women. In the following piece, Gilman reflected on writing and publishing the piece.<\/em><\/p>\n

Many and many a reader has asked that. When the story first came out, in the\u00a0New England Magazine<\/em>\u00a0about 1891, a Boston physician made protest in\u00a0The Transcript<\/em>. Such a story ought not to be written, he said; it was enough to drive anyone mad to read it.<\/p>\n

Another physician, in Kansas I think, wrote to say that it was the best description of incipient insanity he had ever seen, and–begging my pardon–had I been there?<\/p>\n

Now the story of the story is this:<\/p>\n

For many years I suffered from a severe and continuous nervous breakdown tending to melancholia–and beyond. During about the third year of this trouble I went, in devout faith and some faint stir of hope, to a noted specialist in nervous diseases, the best known in the country. This wise man put me to bed and applied the rest cure, to which a still-good physique responded so promptly that he concluded there was nothing much the matter with me, and sent me home with 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 was in 1887.<\/p>\n

I went home and obeyed those directions for some three months, and came so near the borderline of utter mental ruin that I could see over.<\/p>\n

Then, using the remnants of intelligence that remained, and helped by a wise friend, I cast the noted specialist’s advice to the winds and went to work again–work, the normal life of every human being; work, in which is joy and growth and service, without which one is a pauper and a parasite–ultimately recovering some measure of power.<\/p>\n

Being naturally moved to rejoicing by this narrow escape, I wrote\u00a0The Yellow Wallpaper<\/em>, with its embellishments and additions, to carry out the ideal (I never had hallucinations or objections to my mural decorations) and sent a copy to the physician who so nearly drove me mad. He never acknowledged it.<\/p>\n

The little book is valued by alienists and as a good specimen of one kind of literature. It has, to my knowledge, saved one woman from a similar fate–so terrifying her family that they let her out into normal activity and she recovered.<\/p>\n

But the best result is this. Many years later I was told that the great specialist had admitted to friends of his that he had altered his treatment of neurasthenia since reading\u00a0The Yellow Wallpaper<\/em>.<\/p>\n

It was not intended to drive people crazy, but to save people from being driven crazy, and it worked.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Source: The Forerunner<\/em> (October, 1913).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Charlotte Perkins Gilman, \u201cWhy I Wrote\u00a0The Yellow Wallpaper\u201d (1913) Charlotte Perkins Gilman won much attention in 1892 for publishing \u201cThe Yellow Wallpaper,\u201d a semi-autobiographical short story dealing with mental health and contemporary social expectations for women. In the following piece, Gilman reflected on writing and publishing the piece. Many and many a reader has asked […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"parent":400,"menu_order":5,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-407","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.americanyawp.com\/reader\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/407","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.americanyawp.com\/reader\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.americanyawp.com\/reader\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.americanyawp.com\/reader\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.americanyawp.com\/reader\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=407"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.americanyawp.com\/reader\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/407\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":408,"href":"https:\/\/www.americanyawp.com\/reader\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/407\/revisions\/408"}],"up":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.americanyawp.com\/reader\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/400"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.americanyawp.com\/reader\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=407"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}