Gilman, Charlotte Perkins - Linda Wagner-Martin (essay date 1989)
Linda Wagner-Martin (essay date 1989)
SOURCE: “Gilman's ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’: A Centenary,” in Charlotte Perkins Gilman: The Woman and Her Work, edited by Sheryl L. Meyering, UMI Research Press, 1989, pp. 51-64.
[In the following essay, Wagner-Martin examines the relevance of “The Yellow Wallpaper” to the experience of contemporary motherhood.]
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 power of a sacrificed child over her mourning mother's life, and Marilyn French's Her...
[The entire page is 7079 words long]
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