Blog 2

For the last couple of weeks I have been reading works by and doing research about Charlotte Perkins Gilman, who was a socialist and feminist activist in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. She’s really a fascinating person because she used literature to expound many of her feminist ideals. She’s definitely most known for her short story “The Yellow Wall-Paper,” which is a very wonderful story that still has relevance today.

The story is written as the diary of a woman who has been taken to a country estate for a “rest cure” for “nerves” which resembles something more like depression. It’s a complex story about how the nameless narrator is treated by her husband and by other males – mainly they tell her what to do. As she sits in this old empty house, she starts to see things in the wallpaper. What drives her toward madness is the presence of a woman trapped behind the wallpaper fighting to get out. The end of the story doesn’t have a happy ending – the narrator goes completely mad, but Gilman as an author uses that to make a point. She used fiction to make her audience understand that women’s subjection to male dominant culture destroys the identity of the individual – she never really formed one.

The story is relevant because, just as the wallpaper symbolically trapped the narrator, women and other groups are still barred from developing their individuality. It’s really incredible to me that the story was written over 100 years ago, and yet the subject still has meaning for audiences today. For anyone who hasn’t read it, I highly recommend it. It’s very much like an Edgar Allen Poe story, but with great social significance.