The Yellow Wallpaper, Charlotte Perkins Gilman - Linda Wagner-Martin (essay date 1989)
Linda Wagner-Martin (essay date 1989)
SOURCE: Wagner-Martin, Linda. “Gilman's ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’: A Centenary.” In Charlotte Perkins Gilman: The Woman and Her Work, edited by Sheryl L. Meyering, pp. 51-64. Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1989.
[In the following essay, Wagner-Martin discusses the themes of motherhood and self-identity in “The Yellow Wallpaper,” asserting that the story is “a splendid example of gender-based narrative.”]
A friend is dead.
We cannot discount pain but the least bearable pain is the husband's cry of anger: You cannot die. I need you. The children need you. Your duty is to us.
The answer to that is silence.
Written by the author for a friend who died at the age of 39.
It seems no accident that important recent novels have been Toni Morrison's Beloved, about the...
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