It was not intended to drive people crazy, but to save people from being driven crazy, and it worked.“The trend for wallpaper is hotter than ever,” top interior designer Martyn Laurence Bullard told me just around the New Year. Many years later I was told that the great specialist had admitted to friends of his that he had altered his treatment of neurasthenia since reading The Yellow Wallpaper. It has, to my knowledge, saved one woman from a similar fate–so terrifying her family that they let her out into normal activity and she recovered.īut the best result is this. The little book is valued by alienists and as a good specimen of one kind of literature. Then, using the remnants of intelligence that remained, and helped by a wise friend, I cast the noted specialist’s advice to the winds and went to work again–work, the normal life of every human being work, in which is joy and growth and service, without which one is a pauper and a parasite–ultimately recovering some measure of power.īeing naturally moved to rejoicing by this narrow escape, I wrote The Yellow Wallpaper, with its embellishments and additions, to carry out the ideal (I never had hallucinations or objections to my mural decorations) and sent a copy to the physician who so nearly drove me mad. I went home and obeyed those directions for some three months, and came so near the borderline of utter mental ruin that I could see over. This wise man put me to bed and applied the rest cure, to which a still-good physique responded so promptly that he concluded there was nothing much the matter with me, and sent me home with solemn advice to “live as domestic a life as far as possible,” to “have but two hours’ intellectual life a day,” and “never to touch pen, brush, or pencil again” as long as I lived. During about the third year of this trouble I went, in devout faith and some faint stir of hope, to a noted specialist in nervous diseases, the best known in the country. 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 1891, a Boston physician made protest in The Transcript.
In the following piece, Gilman reflected on writing and publishing the piece.
Charlotte Perkins Gilman, “Why I Wrote The Yellow Wallpaper” (1913)Ĭharlotte Perkins Gilman won much attention in 1892 for publishing “The Yellow Wallpaper,” a semi-autobiographical short story dealing with mental health and contemporary social expectations for women.
0 kommentar(er)
