The Yellow Wallpaper, Charlotte Perkins Gilman - Charlotte Perkins Gilman (essay date 1913)
Charlotte Perkins Gilman (essay date 1913)
SOURCE: Gilman, Charlotte Perkins. “Why I Wrote ‘The Yellow Wallpaper.’” In The Captive Imagination: A Casebook on “The Yellow Wallpaper,” edited by Catherine Golden, pp. 51-53. New York: Feminist Press at the City University of New York, 1992.
[In the following essay, originally published in 1913 in The Forerunner, a magazine founded and edited by Gilman, the author offers an explanation of her original intention in writing “The Yellow Wallpaper.”]
Many and many a reader has asked that. When the story first came out, in the New England Magazine about 1891, a Boston physician made protest in The Transcript. Such a story ought not to be written, he said; it was enough to drive anyone mad to read it.
Another 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...
[The entire page is 561 words long]
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