[In the following review of a critical edition of “The Yellow Wallpaper,” edited by Thomas L. Erskine and Connie L. Richards, Felton asserts that the volume fails to address the needs of either an introductory reader or a literary scholar. Felton, however, observes that the introduction, chronology, and bibliography included in the volume are useful.]

This volume on Charlotte Perkins Gilman's “The Yellow Wallpaper” is one of four titles selected to kick off the Women Writers: Texts and Contexts series by Rutgers University Press. According to the press release accompanying the work, the new series is “designed for use in introductory classes in writing and literature but will serve equally well in advanced classes. …” While I applaud the decision to promote this niche market and to make accessible to students a variety of literary texts by women, I must temper my praise if this particular volume is to be held accountable to its advertising claim. To be quite specific, the majority of selections in “The Yellow Wallpaper” volume will far surpass the needs of most introductory students, and the early portions will fail to challenge the needs of more advanced scholars. As one might suspect from the press release excerpt noted above, this volume's fundamental flaw is its failure to capture a distinct audience. That weakness aside, a closer look at the volume might be in order.

Following the text of “The Yellow Wallpaper” itself is a powerful component called “Background to the Story.” This fine section includes two rarely anthologized Gilman stories that will allow introductory students to obtain a fuller picture of Gilman's style, tone, and favorite themes. Moreover, “The ‘Nervous Breakdown’ of Women” overtly affirms Gilman's political stance:

Even if we should remove every legal and political discrimination against women; even if we should accept their true dignity and power as a sex; so long as their universal business is private housework they remain, industrially, at the level of private domestic hand labor, and economically a nonproductive, dependent class. … The wonder is not that so many women break down, but so few.

An understanding of this element of Gilman's writing will help students appreciate the politically charged institution of medicine, especially in the treatment of women, circa 1877. The inclusion of S. Weir Mitchell's investigations on hysteria and Carroll Smith-Rosenberg's modern assessment of the role of the hysterical woman in nineteenth-century America provides instructive complements to the main work.

The collection of nine critical essays in the next major section of the text, however, leaps ahead to a level of sophisticated criticism that will leave the introductory student gasping. Here are some classics from feminist criticism: Gilbert and Gubar's “The Madwoman in the Attic,” Kolodny's “A Map for Rereading,” Fetterley's “Reading about Reading.” Susan S. Lanser argues an immensely provocative thesis: that Gilman held non-Aryan/“yellow” people responsible for filling America with “undesirables” and that a connection may be made between her anti-immigrant sentiments and the bilious color of the title wallpaper. Juliann E. Fleenor's study skillfully links the complex trappings of Gothic literature (specifically, social and/or physical entrapment) to Gilman's biography. Each focus here—feminist, sociopolitical, Gothic, and others—demands a considerable proficiency in literary study; only the student who comprehends the web of critics and arguments cited will extract this section's scholarly richness.

There are features of this volume that will appeal to all students regardless of their experience level: a comprehensive introduction that provides an excellent overview, a chronology, and a selected bibliography to which students may turn for additional assistance. A subject index would have helped. Perhaps one strength of this work (and apparently of the entire series as well) that should not be disregarded in a review is its affordable price: at ＄10 for a substantial 280-page paperback, very few students will complain. If the intent of the editors, then, might indeed have been to diversify, rather than to specify, the audience to which this volume might appeal, their objective has been accomplished.