by Jill Bergman
26. Elizabeth A. Graham, “Las Casitas—A Charming Retreat,” Land of Sun-
shine, April 1895.
27. Ibid.; Harold S. Channing, “To Health Seekers,” in B. R. Baumgardt & Co’s Tourists’ Guide Book to South California, ed. George Wharton James (Los Angeles: B. R. Baumgardt, 1895), 444; Gilman, Living, 276.
28. Gilman, Living, 278; Gilman, Journey, 334.
29. Gilman, Journey, 336, 338.
30. Ibid., 345, 347; Gilman, Living, 102.
31. Charlotte Perkins Gilman, “Dr. Clair’s Place,” Forerunner, June 1915, 141, 142, 144.
32. Katharine makes several references to her mother coming for sittings for a bas- relief, sometimes for as long as two and a half hours. Katharine Beecher Stetson Chamberlin, “Journal,” August and Sep tem ber 1914, Katharine Beecher Stetson Papers, 1827–1956, Correspondence, Gilman Papers, Arthur and Elizabeth
Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA.
33. Gary Scharnhorst, Charlotte Perkins Gilman: A Bibliography (Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press, 1985), 157–75; Gilman, Living, 310.
34. Davis, Biography, 322.
35. Gilman, Living, 333, 334; Gilman, Selected Letters, 294, 299.
36. Katharine Beecher Stetson Chamberlin to Lyman Beecher Stowe, August
20, 1935, Beecher- Stowe Family Collection, Arthur and Elizabeth Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA; Walter Stetson Chamberlin, e- mail to author, February 24, 2011.
Knight / 69
37. Gilman, Selected Letters 302, 303, 305; Chamberlin to Stowe, August 20, 1935, Beecher- Stowe Family Collection. According to Walter Stetson Chamberlin, Gilman started stockpiling small amounts of chloroform in the final months of her life. She visited vari ous pharmacies, asked for just enough chloroform to
“kill a cat,” and was able to collect a sufficient amount. She carried out her suicide on August 17, 1935. Many of the specific details about the aftermath of Gilman’s suicide are contained in the August 20 letter from Katharine to Lyman
Beecher Stowe, three days after her mother’s death. The letter reveals just how strong- willed Gilman was in terminating her life. Gilman’s doctor had cautioned her that self- administration of chloroform would probably fail since “the average person fights the effects when going under.” Katharine surmised, however, that
“the first few whiffs must have carried her off.” She wrote to Stowe that “there was an air of peaceful triumph in her quiet fig ure—she had carried out her plan in all details as she had wished” and that she “had failed very fast” during her last week and was so “feeble” and “weary” that she welcomed death. “She was happy
in the thought—she just longed for it,” Katharine wrote, “so we feel that it was better—far[—]for her to go.” Gilman’s will, which Gilman had updated in 1934, began with a clause addressing the disposition of her remains: “I wish to be cre-mated and that my ashes be disposed of as convenient to my heir, with no fu-
neral services of any kind.” Gilman Papers, folder 284. Katharine honored Gilman’s wishes.
38. Harriet Howe, “Charlotte Perkins Gilman—As I Knew Her,” Equal Rights: Independent Feminist Weekly, Sep tem ber 1936.
39. Gilman, Living, 92.
40. Ibid., 297.
41. Katherine Beecher Stetson Chamberlin to Jeannette Cheek, Sep tem ber 13,
1972, Gilman Papers, Office Correspondence. Katharine insisted that her decision to provide the library with her mother’s papers was not driven by the fact that it specialized in “women’s archives,” but rather because it had “made the first offer.”
WORKS CITED
Beecher- Stowe Family Collection. Arthur and Elizabeth Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA.
Bradstreet, Anne. “The Author to Her Book.” http://www.annebradstreet.com.
Chamberlin, Walter Stetson. Family Papers. Private collection.
Channing, Harold S. “To Health Seekers.” In B. R. Baumgardt & Co’s Tourists’
Guide Book to South California, edited by George Wharton James, 437–44. Los Angeles: B. R. Baumgardt, 1895.
Davis, Cynthia J. Charlotte Perkins Gilman: A Biography. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2010.
70 / Chapter 2
———. “The Two Mrs. Stetsons and the ‘Romantic Summer.’ ” In Charlotte Perkins Gilman and Her Contemporaries, edited by Cynthia J. Davis and Denise D. Knight, 1–16. Tuscaloosa: University of Ala bama Press, 2004.
Eldredge, Charles C. Charles Walter Stetson: Color and Fantasy. Lawrence, KS: Spencer Museum of Art, 1982.
Gilman, Charlotte Perkins. The Diaries of Charlotte Perkins Gilman. 2 vols. Edited by Denise D. Knight. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1994.
———. “Dr. Clair’s Place.” Forerunner, June 1915.
———. Human Work. New York: McClure, Philips, 1904.
———. A Journey from Within: The Love Letters of Charlotte Perkins Gilman, 1897–
1900. Edited by Mary A. Hill. Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 1995.
———. The Living of Charlotte Perkins Gilman: An Autobiography. New York: Appleton- Century, 1935.
———. Papers. Arthur and Elizabeth Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute, Harvard University. Cambridge, MA.
———. The Selected Letters of Charlotte Perkins Gilman. Edited by Denise D.
Knight and Jennifer S. Tuttle. Tuscaloosa: University of Ala bama Press, 2009.
———. Women and Economics: A Study of the Economic Relation between Men and Women as a Factor in Social Evolution. Boston: Small, Maynard, 1898.
———. The Yellow Wall- Paper. 1892. Edited by Elaine R. Hedges. New York: Feminist Press, 1973.
Graham, Elizabeth A. “Las Casitas—A Charming Retreat.” Land of Sunshine, April 1895.
Howe, Harriet. “Charlotte Perkins Gilman—As I Knew Her.” Equal Rights: Independent Feminist Weekly, Sep tem ber 1936.
Knight, Denise D. “The Dying of Charlotte Perkins Gilman.” Ameri can Transcen-dental Quarterly. 13, no. 2 (June 1999): 137–59.
———. “ ‘That Pure New England Stock’: Charlotte Perkins Gilman and the Con-
struction of Identity.” In Charlotte Perkins Gilman: New Texts and Contexts, edited by Jennifer S. Tuttle and Carol Farley Kessler, 27–43. Columbus: Ohio
State University Press, 2011.
Scharnhorst, Gary. Charlotte Perkins Gilman: A Bibliography. Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press, 1985.
Stetson, Charles Walter. Endure: The Diaries of Charles Walter Stetson. Edited by Mary A. Hill. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 1985.
———. “The Painting of The Portrait.” In The Diaries of Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Vol. 1, edited by Denise D. Knight, 876–77. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1994.
———. Papers. Smithsonian Archives of Ameri can Art, Smithsonian Institution,
Wash ing ton, DC.
Knight / 71
Stetson, Katharine Beecher. Papers. 1827–1956. Arthur and Elizabeth Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA.
Tuttle, Jennifer S. “ ‘New England Innocent’ in the Land of Sunshine: Charlotte Perkins Gilman and California.” West ern Ameri can Literature 48, no. 3 (Fall 2013): 284–311.
Tuttle, Jennifer S., and Carol Farley Kessler, eds. Charlotte Perkins Gilman: New Texts, New Contexts. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2011.
3
“The Yellow Wall- Paper”
as Modernist Space
William C. Snyder
As a social reformer from the 1890s until her death in 1935, Charlotte Perkins Gilman is appropriately categorized as a modern writer for advancing progressive ideas about female psychology and domestic economy. Although schol-
ars have shown how her reformist themes were ingeniously incorporated into
“The Yellow Wall- Paper” (1892), the story
breaks ground on another level: its radical visuality allows us to consider Gilman as a modern artist. An exercise in ekphrasis (the literary description of a visual work of art) from the first sentence to the last, “The Yellow Wall- Paper” treats space through semiotic
play in text that is an experiment against the conventions of perception and
depiction, suggesting a number of affinities to innovations in the visual arts that occurred near the time of the author’s early adulthood.
Throughout the story, Gilman requires us to engage several different sets
of visual fields. The ancestral home rented for the summer offers a piazza
with clusters of roses, pleasing grounds, and gratifying third- floor views. The top- floor nursery can be troped as a gallery, the windows providing scenes of a delighting natural world from an elevated point of view. The wallpaper in
this room is essentially a canvas, its fluctuating images drawing the protagonist and the reader into a peculiar and then grotesque experience. Whereas
the first section of the narrative compares and contrasts indoor and outdoor
scenes, the latter part is dominated by idiosyncratic forms and nonlinear se-
quences provided exclusively by the wall.
Familiar with and fluent in perceptual process, the narrator in the story
represents a new kind of character. Gilman, synthesizing her own training in
Snyder / 73
the arts, her repression as a young girl, and her depression as a new mother, created a unique persona: a sensitive, creative woman constantly striving to
understand her environment, made up entirely of her marriage, her mother-
hood, and her confinement, with no occasion to pursue her art. By delving
into the less coherent, more fragmentary, and disturbed recesses of the mind, Gilman invented an imagery for the forced isolation of body and a constraint
on vivid imagination. This convergence of unusual sensibilities and percep-
tions breaks from traditional modes of characterization, making the wife in
“The Yellow Wall- Paper” a modern antiheroine.
Elements of Gilman’s autobiography fig ure heavily in a mode of compo-
sition that introduces us to new ways of correlating physical spaces to figurations of the female. Although the protagonist’s sensibilities are implicit in The Living of Charlotte Perkins Gilman, her perceptual process can be traced in Gilman’s diaries and letters—literary performances all pointing to the author’s persistent and strong sense of physical location.
While attending Providence’s Rhode Island School of Design (1878–1880),
Gilman cherished the one- mile walk along the campus of Brown University,
and when she arrived at the art school she had a place where eye and imagi-
nation could be indulged and where she could fully feel “twenty- one. My own
mistress at last.” She reported being very pleased with her third- floor room on Manning Street, which provided a vista of the town:
From my high window the outlooker sees
The whole wide south ern sky;
Fort Hill is in the distance, always green,
With ordinary houses thick between,
And scanty passers by.
Our street is flat, ungraded, little used,
The sidewalks grown with grass;
And, just across, a fenceless open lot,
Covered with ash- heaps, where the sun shines
On bits of broken glass.
In this space of her own, Gilman enjoyed Providence’s panorama on a daily
basis and was so enamored of fresh air that she attempted to bring the outdoors inside. Just after moving in, she performed an unusual action: “The window
I promptly took out of the casing, it stayed out for the three years we lived there. In very stormy weather I used to stand one of the spare leaves from the dining- table against it; that and closed blinds kept out most of the snow.”1
Clearly, being able to see beyond her own bodily situation and being able
74 / Chapter 3
to connect with visual elements far and near were important to Gilman. More-
over, her free dom to set her own schedule, take students according to her own volition, and walk anywhere without reporting her whereabouts made her feel
“a tremendous sense of power, clean glorious power, of ability to do whatever I decided to undertake.” At this time of her life, Gilman could enjoy a residence that offered a sense of liberation and connection so criti cal to defining a home space, which Gaston Bachelard has said should contain “the psychological elasticity of an image that moves us at an unimaginable depth.”2 Also noteworthy is Gilman’s practice in her autobiography of upholding physical
movement as complementary to perceptual nimbleness and creative motility.
The time after Gilman’s short formal education soon began to contrast with
her time as a student. The years after 1884 brought a reluctant marriage, im-
mediate motherhood, postpartum stress, and a new residence—not far from
her location on Manning Street, but worlds apart in atmosphere. The divi-
sion of these two periods was pronounced in Gilman’s own mind; her move to
Humboldt Street upon her marriage to Walter Stetson was made for traditional
and domestic purposes, and Gilman wrote that she was provided “a charm-
ing home” with “a loving and devoted husband; an exquisite baby, healthy,
intelligent and good; a highly competent mother to run things, a wholly sat-
isfactory servant.” But even though she could acknowledge the comforts of
these trappings, she “lay all day on the lounge and cried.” In this space she was mainly stationary, and clearly she could no longer enjoy any of the virtues of her single existence. The small third- floor room that she had called her own was immensely more satisfying than living in an expansive house
owned by someone else—a role played by the colonial mansion of “The Yel-
low Wall- Paper.”3
In 1888, after having tried S. Weir Mitchell’s rest- cure for neurasthenia,
Gilman relocated to her friend Grace Ellery Channing’s home in Pasadena,
California. Having escaped Providence and the therapy, Gilman wrote to her
closest confidante, Martha Luther, and shared a positive verbal sketch of her new surroundings: “I am really quite happy. I ought to be. The great blue
periwinkles crowd around my little piazza, the roses are coming out by the
hundreds—(two great vines that shade and sweeten the whole front of the
house); the Banksia rose flourishes from ground to ridgepole on the South,
and is myriad budded now; the oranges hang ever ready and the orange blos-
soms make a dreamland all about me, and then there are mockingbirds and
moonlight galore.”4
Gilman’s letters from Pasadena reveal an attention to spaces whose descrip-
tions reclaim her love of openness, airiness, color, and human situation in nature. They provide a record of a creative mind settling into writing as a self-
Snyder / 75
cure, with the Channing house and grounds supplying pleasures and comforts
that flash in and out of the letters—quick sensory notes embedded among
sketches of pleasant familial activity, such as drying her hair in the piazza or watching her daughter, Katharine, swinging in a hammock.5 With more than
a dozen descriptions like these, written just a few months before Gilman com-
posed “The Yellow Wall- Paper,” the letters clearly provided some of the spa-
tial references in the story where the protagonist enjoys natural views sup-
plied by the windows.
While Gilman’s biography and correspondence offer clues to the relation of
place to the emotio
nal disposition of the story’s protagonist, Gilman’s paintings produced through out the 1880s connect to the visual performances preva-
lent in the “The Yellow Wall- Paper.” Art school provided Gilman with a sense of structure and perceptual discipline, and her canvases reveal not only a love of pattern but also a proclivity to experiment with modes of execution within a two- dimensional medium. The collection of her drawings and paintings at
Harvard University’s Schlesinger Library reveals a focus on natural objects,
in clud ing flower drawings with intense colors and a few landscapes with a
strong sense of perspective.
Gilman’s background in the arts, the vicissitudes of her twenties, and per-
haps her exposure to modernist literature put her in the category of late
nineteenth- century artists who felt the limitation of traditional courses of creativity and opted for origi nality in seeing and composing.6 The themes of isolation and fragmentation, along with the shifting of perspective and attention to oddity and absurdity, render “The Yellow Wall- Paper” Gilman’s great-
est artistic breakthrough. It is, ostensibly, the first modernist work of fiction by a woman, appearing a generation before the works of Mina Loy, Gertrude
Stein, and Virginia Woolf.
The definition of the term modernism may have loose boundaries, but its core terminology applies to “The Yellow Wall- Paper.” Chris Baldick states that modern writing represents a “wide range of experimental and avant- garde trends in the literature (and other arts) of the early 20th century” in which literary texts are “characterized chiefly by a rejection of 19th- century traditions and of their consensus between author and reader: conventions of realism or traditional meter.” Modernist writers are “disengaged from bourgeois values,”
disturbing “their readers by adopting complex and difficult new forms and
styles.” Concerning style, modern texts include “techniques of juxtaposition
and multiple points of view” that “challenge the reader to reestablish a coherence of meaning from fragmentary forms.” Christopher Butler observes that