![]() ![]() When the 1960s and 1970s saw more attention paid to Gilman’s work, feminists shaped her rediscovered canon, and “The Yellow Wallpaper” “ acquired a cult status as an early feminist manifesto.”įiction and nonfiction both have the power to inform, to move, to stir. She faded from public consciousness after her death. In her day Gilman was far better known as a lecturer than a fiction writer. But it’s far less common to teach Gilman’s extensive nonfiction writing, and accordingly, most readers only know the story of one story. These readers might even know that Gilman’s own near-catastrophic experience with the “rest cure” under physician Silas Weir Mitchell inspired her to write the story. Thanks to its ubiquity on high school and college syllabi, “The Yellow Wallpaper” has a readership that’s surely hundreds of thousands, if not millions, strong. No other wallpaper, fictional or factual, has ever gotten quite so much attention as the titular wall covering in Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s short story “The Yellow Wallpaper”. “But in the places where it isn’t faded and where the sun is just so-I can see a strange, provoking, formless sort of figure, that seems to skulk about behind that silly and conspicuous front design.” “There is a recurrent spot where the pattern lolls like a broken neck and two bulbous eyes stare at you upside down.” ![]() “The color is repellent, almost revolting a smouldering unclean yellow, strangely faded by the slow-turning sunlight.” ![]()
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