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