Charlotte Perkins Gilman "Why She Wrote The Yellow Wallpaper"
Many and many readers has asked that. When the story first came out, in the New England Magazine about 1891, a Bosto 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 wrote to say that it was the best description of incipient insanity he had ever seen, and asked if had she been there. For many years she suffered from a severe and continuous nervous breakdown tending to melancholia--and beyond. During about the third year of this trouble she went, in devout faith and some faint stir of hope, to a noted specialist in nervous diseases, the best known in the country. This wise man put she to bed and applied the rest cure, to which a still-good physique responded so promptly that he concluded there was nothing much the matter with her, and sent her home with solemn advice to "live as domestic a life as far as possible," to "have but two hours' intellectual life a day," and "never to touch pen, brush, or pencil again" as long as she lived. This was in 1887.
She went home and obeyed those directions for some three months, and came so near the borderline of utter mental ruin that she could see over.
Then, using the remnants of intelligence that remained, and helped by a wise friend, she cast the noted specialist's advice to the winds and went to work again--work, the normal life of every human being; work, in which is joy and growth and service, without which one is a pauper and a parasite--ultimately recovering some measure of power.
Being naturally moved to rejoicing by this narrow escape, she wrote The Yellow Wallpaper, with its embellishments and additions, to carry out the ideal and sent a copy to the physician who so nearly drove her mad. He never acknowledged it.
The little book is valued by alienists and as a good specimen of one kind of literature. It has saved one woman from a similar fate--so terrifying her family that they let her out into normal activity and she recovered.
But the best result is this. Many years later she was told that the great specialist had admitted to friends of his that he had altered his treatment of neurasthenia since reading The Yellow Wallpaper.
It was not intended to drive people crazy, but to save people from being driven crazy, and it worked.
She went home and obeyed those directions for some three months, and came so near the borderline of utter mental ruin that she could see over.
Then, using the remnants of intelligence that remained, and helped by a wise friend, she cast the noted specialist's advice to the winds and went to work again--work, the normal life of every human being; work, in which is joy and growth and service, without which one is a pauper and a parasite--ultimately recovering some measure of power.
Being naturally moved to rejoicing by this narrow escape, she wrote The Yellow Wallpaper, with its embellishments and additions, to carry out the ideal and sent a copy to the physician who so nearly drove her mad. He never acknowledged it.
The little book is valued by alienists and as a good specimen of one kind of literature. It has saved one woman from a similar fate--so terrifying her family that they let her out into normal activity and she recovered.
But the best result is this. Many years later she was told that the great specialist had admitted to friends of his that he had altered his treatment of neurasthenia since reading The Yellow Wallpaper.
It was not intended to drive people crazy, but to save people from being driven crazy, and it worked.
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