The Yellow Wallpaper | Gilman's ''The Yellow Wallpaper": A Centenary
In the following essay, Wagner-Martin takes the one-hundredth anniversary of "The Yellow Wallpaper" as an opportunity to comment on the schism in women's lives caused by their sometimes conflicting roles of being both an individual and a mother.
It seems no accident that important recent novels have been Tom Morrison's Beloved, about the power of a sacrificed child over her mourning mother's life, and Marilyn French's Her Mother's Daughter, a major fiction about four generations of women, linked together in their martyred and futile lives through the mother-daughter bond. For at least these hundred years, since Charlotte Perkins Gilman wrote her controversial and relentlessly accurate "The Yellow Wallpaper," women writers have confronted the basic conflicts of women's lives: how to be both a person and a wife and...
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