Chapter 10
Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Kate Chopin, Edith Wharton and Willa Cather
Charlotte Perkins Gilman Kate Chopin 98 Edith Wharton 100 Willa Cather 103
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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 nineteenthcentury 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 suVering 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 oV at outrageous angles, destroy themselves in unheard of contradictions’.1 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. She becomes aware of an unpleasant smell (‘a yellow smell’) and notices a mark low down on the wall, ‘a long, straight, even smooch, as if it had been rubbed over and over’. She thinks she sees the figure of a woman
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