Wild Unrest
Charlotte Perkins Gilman and the Making of "The Yellow Wall-Paper"
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- $22.99
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- $22.99
Publisher Description
In Wild Unrest, Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz offers a vivid portrait of Charlotte Perkins Gilman in the 1880s, drawing new connections between the author's life and work and illuminating the predicament of women then and now. Horowitz draws on a treasure trove of primary sources to explore the nature of 19th-century nervous illness and to illuminate the making of Gilman's famous short story, "The Yellow Wall-Paper": Gilman's journals and letters, which closely track her daily life and the reading that most influenced her; the voluminous diaries of her husband, Walter Stetson; and the writings, published and unpublished of S. Weir Mitchell, whose rest cure dominated the treatment of female "hysteria" in late 19th-century America. Horowitz argues that these sources ultimately reveal that Gilman's great story emerged more from emotions rooted in the confinement and tensions of her unhappy marriage than from distress following Mitchell's rest cure. Hailed by The Boston Globe as "an engaging portrait of the woman and her times," Wild Unrest adds immeasurably to our understanding of Charlotte Perkins Gilman as well as the literary and personal sources behind "The Yellow Wall-Paper."
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Reformer and author Charlotte Perkins Gilman, who in 1890 wrote the hair-raising, semiautobiographical, and now iconic short story "The Yellow Wall-Paper," documenting an isolated wife's descent from nervous illness into madness, was intimate with her subject. In 1887, when she had a nervous breakdown, Perkins Gilman sought the rest cure of famed neurologist S. Weir Mitchell, and later, she claimed she wrote "The Yellow Wall-Paper" in protest against Mitchell and his methods, which limited women's intellectual activities (though, Horowitz says, probably not as much as the story indicated). But Smith College historian Horowitz, drawing on the personal writings of Perkins Gilman and her first husband, artist Charles Walter Stetson, and Mitchell's abundant papers, concludes that the story was a cri de coeur against Stetson and the traditional marriage he had demanded. Perkins Gilman accused Mitchell, according to Horowitz, primarily to protect her daughter, Katharine, and also her dear friend Grace Channing, who married Stetson after his divorce from Perkins Gilman, and raised Katharine. This convincing, absorbing, and perceptive book should find a general readership as well as an important place with women's studies and psychology students. 20 b&w illus.
