Such a story ought not to be written, he said it was enough to drive anyone mad to read it.Īnother 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?įor many years I suffered from a severe and continuous nervous breakdown tending to melancholia - and beyond. When the story first came out, in the New England Magazine about 1892, a Boston physician made protest in The Transcript. Living under patriarchal rule, she is discouraged from self-expression and productivity via work and writing.” Here’s what Charlotte Perkins Gilman had to say in this retrospective look at her most famous work. In Sarah Wyman’s analysis of The Yellow Wallpaper , she writes of the story’s narrator that “we can see the prison-like room she inhabits (with barred windows, a gate on the stairs, rings in the walls, and a nailed-down bed) as symbolic of her situation as an upper-middle-class woman of a particular time and place (19th century America). “Why I Wrote the Yellow Wallpaper” deals directly with the postpartum depression she suffered from, and her hopes that the story would enlighten other women who had similar experiences. The 1892 long-form short story (or novella) became and remains a classic in feminist literature. In it she answers the question posed by “many and many” a reader on why she wrote The Yellow Wallpaper. This article by Charlotte Perkins Gilman originally appeared in the October 1913 issue of The Forerunner.

In the yellow wallpaper