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About The Yellow Wallpaper
In 1887, two years after giving birth to her daughter, Charlotte Perkins Gilman started suffering from neurasthenia, an emotional disorder characterized by fatigue and depression. The esteemed physician Silas Weir Mitchell, mentioned briefly in "The Yellow Wallpaper," prescribed a "rest cure" that promoted domesticity and curbed creative expression. Unable to write or do any work for three months, Gilman found she was growing slowly insane and eventually abandoned the doctor's advice. Fortunately, it worked, and soon after she wrote an exaggerated version of her experience (she never had hallucinations) as "The Yellow Wallpaper." Gilman sent the story to writer William Dean Howells, who handed it to Horace Scudder, editor of the prestigious magazine The Atlantic Monthly. Scudder rejected it as depressing material, though he may have also felt that the story too systematically described domesticated female oppression in late 19th-century America. The story was eventually published in May 1892, in The New England Magazine, and received a strong, but mixed, reaction. Gilman also sent Mitchell a copy of the story and, though he never responded, she learned that he changed his treatment of neurasthenia as a result. With her cautionary tale of female imprisonment and encouragement of feminist awareness, Gilman probably saved scores of other women from fates similar to the story's narrator.
ClassicNote on The Yellow Wallpaper
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