Critical Essays on Charlotte Perkins Gilman


Book Description

This volume, "Critical Essay on Charlotte Perkins Gilman", is the most comprehensive collection of essays ever published on this important writer, who has recently emerged as a subject for intense scholarly investigation. -- From general editor's note.




The Yellow Wall-Paper


Book Description

She has just given birth to their child. He labels her postpartum depression as »hysteria.« He rents the attic in an old country house. Here, she is to rest alone – forbidden to leave her room. Instead of improving, she starts hallucinating, imagining herself crawling with other women behind the room's yellow wallpaper. And secretly, she records her experiences. The Yellow Wall-Paper [1892] is the short but intense, Gothic horror story, written as a diary, about a woman in an attic – imprisoned in her gender; by the story. Charlotte Perkins Gilman's feminist novella was long overlooked in American literary history. Nowadays, it is counted among the classics. CHARLOTTE PERKINS GILMAN (1860–1935), born in Hartford, Connecticut, was an American feminist theorist, sociologist, novelist, short story writer, poet, and playwright. Her writings are precursors to many later feminist theories. With her radical life attitude, Perkins Gilman has been an inspiration for many generations of feminists in the USA. Her most famous work is the short story The Yellow Wall-Paper [1892], written when she suffered from postpartum psychosis.




Herland Illustrated


Book Description

Herland is a utopian novel from 1915, written by feminist Charlotte Perkins Gilman. The book describes an isolated society composed entirely of women, who reproduce via parthenogenesis (asexual reproduction). The result is an ideal social order: free of war, conflict, and domination. It was first published in monthly installments as a serial in 1915 in The Forerunner, a magazine edited and written by Gilman between 1909 and 1916, with its sequel, With Her in Ourland beginning immediately thereafter in the January 1916 issue. The book is often considered to be the middle volume in her utopian trilogy; preceded by Moving the Mountain (1911), and followed by, With Her in Ourland (1916). It was not published in book form until 1979.




Charlotte Perkins Gilman


Book Description

Known to her contemporaries as a fervent advocate of reform on social, economic, and religious fronts, designated an "optimist reformer" by William Dean Howells, Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1860-1935) today is celebrated more as a writer of novels and short stories, particularly Herland and The Yellow Wallpaper, than as the author of the many social and political essays that originally made her so prominent. The essayists in this spirited volume return to Gilman's primary focus by reminding us that the main purpose of her writing was reform. Charlotte Perkins Gilman: Optimist Reformer looks at Gilman's legacy for women at the end of the twentieth century; in doing so its contributors reassess both her reformist ideas and our own views on fin de siecle feminism. Gilman scholarship has indeed moved on from the much needed recovery of her work to more critical treatments that allow us to acknowledge elements now regarded as unacceptable. As a result, the essayists here reappraise Gilman and her writings in ways that directly address hithertofore overlooked points, such as her racism, her almost willful disregard of issues of class, and her broadly essentialist view of women. The effect of this collection is thus twofold: Gilman and her works are both reassessed in light of current feminist thought and presented in the context of her own time. A constant theme is the recognition of her unwavering belief that things could be changed for the better; it is this persistent optimism that made her such a forceful voice for reform. Thus the essayists demonstrate that engagement with Gilman's reformist views is still pertinent for feminist debate today.




The Yellow Wallpaper Illustrated


Book Description

"""The Yellow Wallpaper"" is a short story by American writer Charlotte Perkins Gilman, first published in January 1892 in The New England Magazine.[1] It is regarded as an important early work of American feminist literature, due to its illustration of the attitudes towards mental and physical health of women in the 19th century.Narrated in the first person, the story is a collection of journal entries written by a woman whose physician husband (John) has rented an old mansion for the summer. Forgoing other rooms in the house, the couple moves into the upstairs nursery. As a form of treatment, the unnamed woman is forbidden from working, and is encouraged to eat well and get plenty of air, so she can recuperate from what he calls a ""temporary nervous depression - a slight hysterical tendency"", a diagnosis common to women during that period"







Charlotte Perkins Gilman and a Woman's Place in America


Book Description

Charlotte Perkins Gilman and a Woman's Place in America probes how depictions of space, confinement, and liberation establish both the difficulty and necessity of female empowerment. Turning Victorian notions of propriety and a woman's place on its ear, this essay collection studies Gilman's writings and the manner in which they push back against societal norms and reject male-dominated confines of space. The contributors present readings of some of Gilman's most significant works. By examining the settings in "The Yellow Wallpaper" and Herland, for example, the volume analyzes Gilman's construction of place, her representations of male dominance and female subjugation, and her analysis of the rules and obligations that women feel in conforming to their assigned place: the home. Additionally, this volume delineates female resistance to this conformity. Contributors highlight how Gilman's narrators often choose resistance over obedient captivity, breaking free of the spaces imposed upon them in order to seek or create their own habitats. Through biographical interpretations of Gilman's work that focus on the author's own renouncement of her "natural" role of wife and mother, contributors trace her relocation to the American West in an attempt to appropriate the masculinized spaces of work and social organization. --




Charlotte Perkins Gilman


Book Description

"Charlotte Perkins Gilman: New Texts, New Contexts represents a new phase of feminist scholarhip in recovery, drawing readers' attention to Gilman's lesser-known works from fresh perspectives that revise what we thought we knew about the author and her work." -- Book Cover.




Quotidiana


Book Description

Reflecting on Montaigne, Virginia Woolf remarked, "The most common actions-a walk, a talk, solitude in one's own orchard-can be enhanced and lit up by the association of the mind." In Quotidiana, Patrick Madden illuminates these common actions and seemingly commonplace moments, making connections that revise and reconfigure the overlooked and underappreciated.




Wild Unrest


Book Description

In Wild Unrest, Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz offers a vivid portrait of Charlotte Perkins Gilman in the 1880s, drawing new connections between the author's life and work and illuminating the predicament of women then and now. Horowitz draws on a treasure trove of primary sources to explore the nature of 19th-century nervous illness and to illuminate the making of Gilman's famous short story, "The Yellow Wall-Paper": Gilman's journals and letters, which closely track her daily life and the reading that most influenced her; the voluminous diaries of her husband, Walter Stetson; and the writings, published and unpublished of S. Weir Mitchell, whose rest cure dominated the treatment of female "hysteria" in late 19th-century America. Horowitz argues that these sources ultimately reveal that Gilman's great story emerged more from emotions rooted in the confinement and tensions of her unhappy marriage than from distress following Mitchell's rest cure. Hailed by The Boston Globe as "an engaging portrait of the woman and her times," Wild Unrest adds immeasurably to our understanding of Charlotte Perkins Gilman as well as the literary and personal sources behind "The Yellow Wall-Paper."