Peeling The Wallpaper: Women, Sexism and Insanity
author: kirsten anderberg
 e-mail: kirstena@resist.ca
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In 1913, Charlotte Perkins Gilman wrote an essay entitled, "Why I wrote "The Yellow Wallpaper."" She outlines things said to her by males of the time, telling her to limit her intellect to two hours a day, and to not touch a pen or paper to write. She explains how that almost drove her crazy in her classic essay, The Yellow Wallpaper. I think this issue is still relevant today...
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Below is Charlotte Perkins Gilman's explanation of why she wrote the controversial essay, "The Yellow Wallpaper." "The Yellow Wallpaper" ( http://resist.ca/~kirstena/pageyellowwallpaper.html) was originally published in 1899. It caused a firestorm of controversy. And from Charlotte's essay in 1913 on the controversial essay, it seems she gets the same kind of mail I get now, in 2006, as a controversial feminist writer. I read this piece in community college in a literature class. It described much of how I felt as a single mom isolated with a child on welfare and zero support. And now, in 2006, as I ask the painful questions as a female writer such as why AKPress does not promote women writers on its main webpage or why Anarchy magazine does not publish women in even a 25% capacity, I look at the wallpaper and vow, not to peel it! I think a read of Charlotte's Yellow Wallpaper piece is as relevant now as it ever was for women to understand what we are up against and how to save ourselves from the madness of sexism.
Charlotte Perkins Gilman's "Why I Wrote The Yellow Wallpaper" (1913)
This article originally appeared in the October 1913 issue of The Forerunner.
"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 The Yellow Wallpaper, 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 The Yellow Wallpaper.
It was not intended to drive people crazy, but to save people from being driven crazy, and it worked." - C.P. Gilman
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homepage: http://www.kirstenanderberg.com
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