Current Event

Charlotte Perkins Gilman would have a lot to say about the current state of a woman's place in the world. Although women have come along way from being simple child bearers and companions for their husbands I don't believe we've come as far as Perkins would have wanted. Women are still striving to be granted equal pay in the workforce and to be treated respectfully. Gilman called herself a humanist and believed society is to blame for the way women are treated. As long as there still people alive and well who believe women to be possessions not people, women will still constantly be trying to be seen as equals.

Literary Analysis

One of Charlotte Perkins Gilman's most notable works on women's suffrage is 'The Yellow Wall-Paper'. The short story is an epistolary type novel. Which means, it's written in the form of documents; in this case, the narrator's journal entries. The narrator is a young woman who's husband acts as her physician. She's just recently given birth to a child and is suffering from postpartum depression. The woman's husband keeps her locked away in an upstairs room, believing this will help her. In the end, it only makes her worse. The isolation from friends and family makes the narrator slowly descend into a madness. The yellow wall paper that covers the room begins to look like there is a woman behind it, trying to crawl out.

The story itself is a twisted auto-biography of the author's, Gilman's, own treatment after she went through postpartum depression after the birth of her daughter. This coincides with the Realism aspect of the story. Realism is said to reflect the lives a modern, middle class people. This not only reflected it, but bits and pieces of Gilman's own reality were put into her story.

The narrator of the story is suppose to represent women of the Nineteenth century and how they were repressed to follow the orders of their husbands. Or any man or boy for that matter. Women were to be seen not heard and a man's opinion was always taken over a women's. Whether it was right or wrong.

The narrator's husband represents most men of the Nineteenth century. Her husband believed in science and he thought that keeping his wife locked up would heal her. Despite his wife pleas, he continued on with his treatment. I don't believe this necessarily makes the husband a typical antagonist of the story. True, the way he treated his wife was not right, but that was normalcy back then. He was simply being the husband he thought he needed to be. It didn't mean he didn't love or care for his wife. Obviously, he did or he wouldn't have tried to treat her.

Literary Movement

Charlotte Perkins Gilman was part of two literary movements during her time. The first movement, Realism, started during the late nineteenth century. Unlike the Romantics of the earlier half of the century, Realist authors wrote stories about the common, middle class man. Realists didn't see the individuals in their stories as heroes or some sort of idol; they wrote and saw them as simple people. Realist writers wrote dialogue between their characters that reflected how middle class people spoke with each other. Because of this, readers could relate to the characters in a Realist author's story more than they could if the author was a Romantic.


Another literary movement she was a part of was the Naturalism movement of the late nineteenth and early 20th centuries. Naturalism was a more harsh depiction of the Realism movement. Naturalists believed that the world and society around a person decided how a person's would be. That we had little to do with our destinies and could do little to change them.


Charlotte Perkins Gilman's works were about feminism and the role a woman played in the nineteenth century. She conveyed how they were treated and how other's saw women. In 'The Yellow Wall-Paper' showed how even though our narrator wasn't recovering from her depression, her husband still continued to keep her isolated because that's what he, a man, believed was best for her. Because of the time period our narrator was alive in her 'treatment' was considered normal and not to be questioned. Certainly not by a woman. This idea of depicting a middle class woman's life is an example of Realism. It's an example if Naturalism because of the narrator can't escape her treatment. She's left to suffer, her mental health deteriorating, because her husband believes he is right.




Work Cited:
Chase, Richard. The American Novel and Its Tradition. Garden City, NY:  Doubleday, 1957.




Wilkie, Brian and James Hurt.   "Realism and Naturalism."  Literature of the Western World.  Ed.  Brian Wilkie and James Hurt.  4th ed. Vol. 2. Upper Saddle River: Prentice Hall, 1997


PBS. "1890's-1920's." The American Novel. 04/26/2011. http://www.pbs.org/wnet/americannovel/timeline/naturalism.html

Charlotte Perkins Gilman

Charlotte Perkins Gilman was born on July 3, 1860. Her father had left the family early, leaving her, her mother, and brother in poverty. She taught herself to read when she was young. She, herself, suffered from post-partum depression after the birth of her daughter; which was influence to her short story 'The Yellow Wall-Paper'. Charlotte was an active feminist and oranized many social reform movements.

She is a significant author and made a contribution to literature like other feminist authors. Charlotte wrote about realism. She wrote about exactly how women were treated in the era that she lived. 'The Yellow Wall-Paper' is a great example of realism because it shows how the way women were treated directly reflected on their mental and emotional state. Not to mention how it effects them physically. Charlotte's story is significant because it's a more abstract way of showing the realism of a women's role in the Nineteenth Century. It appeals more to the public.