Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Chapter 1 Introduction
- Chapter 2 The short story as ironic myth: Washington Irving and William Austin
- Chapter 3 Nathaniel Hawthorne
- Chapter 4 Edgar Allan Poe
- Chapter 5 Herman Melville
- Chapter 6 New territories: Bret Harte and Mark Twain
- Chapter 7 Realism, the grotesque and impressionism: Hamlin Garland, Ambrose Bierce and Stephen Crane
- Chapter 8 Henry James
- Chapter 9 Rebecca Harding Davis, Sarah Orne Jewett and Mary Wilkins Freeman
- Chapter 10 Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Kate Chopin, Edith Wharton and Willa Cather
- Chapter 11 Growth, fragmentation, new aesthetics and new voices in the early twentieth century
- Chapter 12 O. Henry and Jack London
- Chapter 13 Sherwood Anderson
- Chapter 14 Ernest Hemingway
- Chapter 15 F. Scott Fitzgerald
- Chapter 16 William Faulkner
- Chapter 17 Katherine Anne Porter, Eudora Welty and Flannery O'Connor
- Chapter 18 Charles Chesnutt, Richard Wright, James Baldwin and the African American short story to 1965
- Chapter 19 Aspects of the American short story 1930–1980
- Chapter 20 Two traditions and the changing idea of the mainstream
- Chapter 21 The postmodern short story in America
- Chapter 22 Raymond Carver
- Chapter 23 Epilogue: the contemporary American short story
- Notes
- Guide to further reading
- Index
Chapter 10 - Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Kate Chopin, Edith Wharton and Willa Cather
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 June 2012
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Chapter 1 Introduction
- Chapter 2 The short story as ironic myth: Washington Irving and William Austin
- Chapter 3 Nathaniel Hawthorne
- Chapter 4 Edgar Allan Poe
- Chapter 5 Herman Melville
- Chapter 6 New territories: Bret Harte and Mark Twain
- Chapter 7 Realism, the grotesque and impressionism: Hamlin Garland, Ambrose Bierce and Stephen Crane
- Chapter 8 Henry James
- Chapter 9 Rebecca Harding Davis, Sarah Orne Jewett and Mary Wilkins Freeman
- Chapter 10 Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Kate Chopin, Edith Wharton and Willa Cather
- Chapter 11 Growth, fragmentation, new aesthetics and new voices in the early twentieth century
- Chapter 12 O. Henry and Jack London
- Chapter 13 Sherwood Anderson
- Chapter 14 Ernest Hemingway
- Chapter 15 F. Scott Fitzgerald
- Chapter 16 William Faulkner
- Chapter 17 Katherine Anne Porter, Eudora Welty and Flannery O'Connor
- Chapter 18 Charles Chesnutt, Richard Wright, James Baldwin and the African American short story to 1965
- Chapter 19 Aspects of the American short story 1930–1980
- Chapter 20 Two traditions and the changing idea of the mainstream
- Chapter 21 The postmodern short story in America
- Chapter 22 Raymond Carver
- Chapter 23 Epilogue: the contemporary American short story
- Notes
- Guide to further reading
- Index
Summary
Charlotte Perkins Gilman
In the last quarter of the twentieth century, Charlotte Perkins Gilman's ‘The Yellow Wall-Paper’ (1890) became perhaps the most famous nineteenth-century story by an American woman, and an icon for American feminist criticism. Like Freeman's ‘Luella Miller’, it achieves its extraordinary impact by means of the narrator's individual voice. The narrator is the wife of a doctor: according to her husband, she is suffering from a ‘temporary nervous depression’ and must avoid all work, particularly her writing, while she herself believes she needs ‘congenial work, excitement and change’. She is confined to a bedroom at the top of the colonial mansion they have recently rented, a sinister room that has bars on the windows and rings in the walls (it was once a nursery and a gymnasium), and a wallpaper with a colour ‘repellent, almost revolting; a smouldering unclean yellow, strangely faded by the slow-turning sunlight’ and a dull confusing pattern which irritates and provokes: ‘when you follow the lame uncertain curves a little distance, they suddenly commit suicide – plunge off at outrageous angles, destroy themselves in unheard of contradictions’. The narrator writes her account in the room itself, talking directly to the reader in the present tense, or perhaps, more disturbingly, talking to herself. Gradually she becomes obsessed with the idea that she sees the figure of a woman, trapped in the yellow wallpaper, trying to get out.
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- The Cambridge Introduction to the American Short Story , pp. 96 - 106Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2006