Why I Wrote The Yellow Wallpaper | |
Author | Charlotte Perkins Gilman |
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Published |
1913
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Language | English |
Nationality | American |
Genre | Feminist Literature, Social Commentary |
1913 Short Story
Why I Wrote The Yellow Wallpaper
Why I Wrote The Yellow Wallpaper is an English Feminist Literature, Social Commentary short story by American writer Charlotte Perkins Gilman. It was first published in 1913. Why I Wrote the Yellow Wallpaper was published in the October 1913 edition of The Forerunner. Enjoy reading Gilman's ground-breaking story in feminist literature, The Yellow Wallpaper. Visit our Feminist Literature - Study Guide for more on this genre.
Why I Wrote The Yellow Wallpaper
by Charlotte Perkins Gilman
Many and many a reader has asked that. When the story first came out, in the New England Magazine about 1891, a Boston physician made protest in The Transcript. Such a story ought not to be written, he said; it was enough to drive anyone mad to read it.
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?
Now the story of the story is this:
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.
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.
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.
Being naturally moved to rejoicing by this narrow escape, I wrote , 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.
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.
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 .
It was not intended to drive people crazy, but to save people from being driven crazy, and it worked.