Charlotte Perkins Gilman's The Yellow Wall-Paper: A Sourcebook and Critical Edition

by Golden; Catherine J.

• ISBN13: 9780415263580
• ISBN10: 0415263581
• Format: Nonspecific Binding
• Copyright: 2004-10-28
• Publisher: Routledge

Summary

In 1892, Charlotte Perkins Gilman published her landmark work,The Yellow Wall-Paper, generating spirited debates in literary and political circles on both sides of the Atlantic. Today this story of a young wife and mother succumbing to madness is hailed both as a feminist classic and a key text in the American literary canon. This sourcebook combines extracts from contemporary documents and critical reviews with incisive commentary, providing: *an introduction to the political, biographical and medical contexts in which Gilman was writing *a publishing and critical history of the work with extracts from the earliest reviews through to recent criticism *a chronology of key biographical and contextual events *an annotated guide to further reading *original illustrations and photographs of the author and figures related to the story. Filled with extensive commentary, as well as contextual and critical materials, this reprint of the complete original text-as published inthe New England Magazine in 1892-constitutes an important critical edition.

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations	xii
Annotation and Footnotes	xiii
Acknowledgments	xiv
Introduction	1	(8)
I: Contexts
Contextual Overview	9	(8)
Chronology	17	(9)
Contemporary Documents	26	(45)
Selected Letters	26	(2)
From Charlotte Perkins Stetson, Letter to Martha Luther Lane, 1890	26	(1)
William Dean Howells, Letter to Horace E. Scudder, 1890	27	(1)
Horace E. Scudder, Letter to Charlotte Perkins Stetson, 1890	27	(1)
Literary Context	28	(24)
Edgar Allan Poe, "The Tell-Tale Heart," The Pioneer (1843)	28	(4)
Drum Alice James, The Diary of Alice James (posthumously published in 1934)	32	(2)
Charlotte Perkins Gilman, "Through This," Kate Field's Washington (1893)	34	(3)
Kate Chopin, "The Story of an Hour," Vogue (1894)	37	(2)
Selected poems from Charlotte Perkins Gilman, In This Our World (3rd edn, 1898)	39	(6)
Charlotte Perkins Gilman, "Why I Wrote 'The Yellow Wallpaper'?," forerunner (1913)	45	(2)
Drum Charlotte Perkins Gilman, The Living of Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1935)	47	(5)
Cultural Context	52	(5)
From Catharine E. Beecher and Harriet Beecher Stowe, The American Woman's Home (1869)	52	(3)
From Charles Eastlake, Hints on Household Taste: The Classic Handbook of Victorian Interior Decoration (4th edn, 1878)	55	(2)
From Sylvanus Stall, What a Young Husband Ought to Know (1897)	57	(1)
Scientific Context	57	(14)
From Edward H. Clarke, M.D., Sex in Education; Or, A Fair Chance for the Girls (1873)	57	(2)
From Dr. Fordyce Barker, The Puerperal Diseases: Clinical Lectures Delivered at Bellevue Hospital (1874)	59	(2)
From Dr. S. Weir Mitchell, Fat and Blood: And How to Make Them (1877) and Doctor and Patient (1887)	61	(10)
2: Interpretations
Critical History	71	(17)
Nineteenth-Century and Early Twentieth-Century Interpretations	81	(7)
Selected Reviews of "The Yellow Wall-Paper"	81	(7)
Initial two reviews in Boston Evening Transcript, 1892	81	(1)
A[nne] M[ontgomerie], "The Yellow Wall Paper," The Conservator 10 (June 1899)	82	(1)
Anon., "New Books and Those Who Make Them," Boston Daily Advertiser, June 10, 1899	83	(1)
Anon., "A Question of 'Nerves.' "/Times(?)/(Baltimore, Md.), June 10, 1899	83	(1)
H[enry] B. B[lackwell], -Literary Notices: The Yellow Wall Paper," Woman's Journal, June 17, 1899	83	(1)
Anon., "Books: Light and Serious Stories," Time and the Hour 10, June 17, 1899	84	(1)
Anon., "Minor Fiction," Literature (American edition), July 14, 1899	85	(1)
Anon., "The Yellow Wall Paper," The Literary World (Boston), July 22, 1899	85	(1)
Anon., "Brief Reviews," The Daily Oklahoman (Oklahoma City), January 29, 1928	85	(1)
Anon., "New Books in Brief Review," The Independent, February 11, 1928	85	(1)
From William Dean Howells (ed.), "Introduction," The Great Modern American Stories, An Anthology (1920)	86	(2)
Modern Criticism	88	(39)
From Elaine R. Hedges, "Afterword" to The Yellow Wallpaper (The Feminist Press edition, 1973)	88	(3)
From Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic (1979)	91	(1)
From Annette Kolodny, "A Map for Rereading" (1980)	92	(2)
From Mary Jacobus, "An Unnecessary Maze of Sign Reading" (1986)	94	(2)
From Janice Haney-Peritz, "Monumental Feminism and Literature's Ancestral House: Another Look at 'The Yellow Wallpaper' " (1986)	96	(3)
From Walter Benn Michaels, "Introduction," The Gold Standard and the Logic of Naturalism: American Literature at the Turn of the Century (1987)	99	(2)
From Catherine J. Golden, "The Writing of 'The Yellow Wallpaper': A Double Palimpsest" (1989)	101	(4)
From Susan Lanser, "Feminist Criticism, 'The Yellow Wallpaper,' and the Politics of Color in America" (1989)	105	(3)
From Tom Lutz, American Nervousness, 1903: An Anecdotal History (1991)	108	(3)
From Jonathan Crewe, "Queering The Yellow Wallpaper? Charlotte Perkins Gilman and the Politics of Form" (1995)	111	(3)
From Ann Heilmann, "Overwriting Decadence: Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Oscar Wilde, and the Feminization of Art in 'The Yellow Wall-Paper' " (2000)	114	(3)
From Marty Roth, "Gilman's Arabesque Wallpaper" (2001)	117	(4)
From Guiyou Huang, "The Use of Audiovisual Material as an Aid in Teaching 'The Yellow Wall-Paper' " (2003)	121	(6)
3: Text
Introduction	127	(4)
A Note on the Text	129	(2)
The Yellow Wall-Paper	131	(26)
4: Further Reading
Story Collections	157	(1)
Editions with Story and Criticism	158	(1)
Articles	158	(2)
Biographical Reading	160	(1)
Bibliographical Approaches	160	(1)
Pedagogical Approaches	161	(1)
Books on Gilman's Oeuvre	161	(1)
Companion Pieces by Gilman	161	(2)
Index	163