Authors
Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1860-1935) and Theodore Dreiser (1871-1945)
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No collected edition of Gilman’s writings exists, but the intense interest in her work has resulted in several reprints of such key titles as The Living of Charlotte Perkins Gilman: An Autobiography (1975); Women and Economics (1966), edited by Carl Degler; Women and Economics: A Study of the Economic Relation Between Men and Women as a Factor in Social Evolution, ed. Michael Kimmel (1998); Herland (1979), edited by Ann J. Lane; The Charlotte Perkins Gilman Reader (1980), edited by Ann J. Lane; Herland and Selected Stories by Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1992), edited by Barbara Solomon. Lane’s full-scale critical biography, To Herland and Beyond: The Life and Work of Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1990), is now standard. Mary A. Hill’s Charlotte Perkins Gilman: The Making of a Radical Feminist (1980) and her Endure: The Diaries of Charles Walter Stetson (1985) illuminate Gilman’s early years. Hill also edited A Journey From Within: The Love Letters of Charlotte Perkins Gilman, 1897– 1900 (1995). Denise D. Knight edited the twovolume The Diaries of Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1994). An interesting biographical find is presented in “ ‘All the Facts of the Case’: Gilman’s Lost Letter to Dr. S. Weir Mitchell,” Denise D. Knight, American Literary Realism (2005). Critical books worthy of note include the Twayne volume Charlotte Perkins Gilman: A Study of the Short Fiction, by Denise D. Knight (1997); Gary Scharnhorst’s Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1985), Polly Wynn Allen’s Building Domestic Liberty: Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Architectural Feminism (1988), Sheryl L. Meyering’s Charlotte Perkins Gilman: The Woman and Her Work (1989), and Denise Knight’s Charlotte Perkins Gilman: A Study of the Short Fiction (1997). Carol Farley Kessler’s Charlotte Perkins Gilman: Her Progress Toward Utopia with Selected Writings (1994) reprints fourteen selections form Gilman’s utopian writings. A useful companion volume, Charlotte Perkins Gilman: Optimist Reformer (1999), brings together essays, many of which address Gilman’s reformist impulses as well as blind spots in her thinking. Cynthia J. Davis and Knight have edited Charlotte Perkins Gilman and Her Contemporaries: Literary and Intellectual Contexts (2004). Joanne B. Karpinski edited Critical Essays on Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1992). An interesting comparative study is Kate Chopin, Edith Wharton and Charlotte Perkins Gilman: Studies in Short Fiction by Janet Beer (2005). Charlotte Perkins Gilman: Optimist Reformer (1999), ed. Jill Rudd and Val Gough, offers thirteen original essays focused on such difficult issues as Gilman’s racism, class consciousness, and essentialist view of women. Raising the Dust: The Literary Housekeeping of Mary Ward, Sarah Grand, and Charlotte Perkins Gilman by Beth Sutton- Ramspeck (2004) and Wayward Reproductions: Genealogies of Race and Nation in Transatlantic Modern Thought, Alys Eve Weinbaum (2004) devote considerable space to Gilman. Thomas L. Erskine and Conee L. Richards edited and introduced “The Yellow Wallpaper” Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1993). Catherine Golden edited The Captive Imagination: A Casebook on “The Yellow Wallpaper” (1991). Julie Bates Dock’s The Legend of “The Yellow Wallpaper”: A Documentary Casebook (1998) and Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “the Yellow Wall- Paper” and the History of Its Publication and Reception: A Critical Edition and Documentary Casebook (1998) established for the first time a reliable critical edition and publication history for this celebrated story and supplies a rich set of contextualizing documents illuminating the genesis, compositional and publication histories of the text as well as more than a score of contemporary reviews and other commentary. Dock’s “ ‘But One Expects That’: Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’ and the Shifting Light of Scholarship,” PMLA (January 1996), should also be consulted. Also useful are “The Yellow Wall-Paper” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman : A Dual-Textbook Critical Edition, ed. Shawn St. Jean(2006); The Pedagogical Wallpaper: Teaching Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s ‘The Yellow Wallpaper,’ ” ed. Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock (2003), consisting of ten essays; Approaches to Teaching Gilman’s “The Yellow Wall-paper,” and Herland, ed. Denise D. Knight and Cynthia J. Davis (2003); and The Mixed Legacy of Charlotte Perkins Gilman, ed. Catherine J. Golden and Joanna Schneider Zangrando, with fourteen essays on Gilman’s life and career and especially “The Yellow Wall-Paper” (2000). Every year dozens of new essays on “The Yellow Wall-Paper” appear in academic journals.
Born in Hartford, Connecticut, Charlotte Perkins was raised by her mother after her father abandoned the family shortly following her birth. Her mother moved her two children to her original home, Rhode Island, where she withheld physical expressions of love from them in an attempt to steel them against the future pain of broken relationships. Gilman worked as a governess, teacher, and greeting-card designer before reluctantly marrying Charles Stetson in 1884--she had become increasingly aware that women did not receive equal rights, and she was concerned that she would have difficulty beginning a writing career as a new wife and mother. After the birth of her daughter, Gilman became depressed and was advised to seek bed rest and to limit her intellectual endeavors. This "cure" so frustrated Gilman that she nearly went mad, recovering by thrusting her energies into the American Woman Suffrage Association. Soon after, she composed The Yellow Wall-paper (1892), which was based on her experience with depression. When her marriage broke up, Gilman sent her daughter to live with her ex-husband and his new wife, Gilman's former best friend. She married her first cousin, George Houghton Gilman, in 1900 and continued her writing career, producing books that advocated reform, including Women and Economics (1898), Concerning Children (1900), and The Man-Made World (1911), as well as the novels Moving the Mountain (1911), Herland (1915), and With Her in Ourland (1916).
Born in Terre Haute, Indiana, Theodore Dreiser grew up in a poor family with an emotionally distant and morally rigid father. Dreiser supported himself from the age of fifteen, spending one year at Indiana University before obtaining a job as a reporter with the Chicago Globe. He read the works of late-nineteenth-century scientists and social scientists such as Charles Darwin and Thomas Huxley who agreed that human evolution was based upon the principle of the "survival of the fittest." Fascinated by human destinies and motives, Dreiser addressed the tension between determinism and human compassion in his fiction. In the early 1900s, Dreiser suffered a nervous breakdown but rallied to become an editor and, later, editorial director of the Butterick Publishing Company. His novels include Sister Carrie (1900), Jennie Gerhardt (1911), and An American Tragedy (1925).
Questions for Discussion and Writing
Compare “The Yellow Wallpaper” and Sister Carrie: one story is about a young woman who goes mad amid the “safety” of domestic incarceration; the other is about a young woman of no special education, talent, or promise, casting herself into the turmoil of Chicago, at that time America’s fastest growing and most uproarious big city. The stories make a provocative pair about the plight of women at the end of the nineteenth century: the perils of staying where you are, and the perils of seeking your fortune, entirely on your own, in the turmoil of the new metropolis.
1. Women trapped by families and circumstances, and women out on their own: come up with a list of five stories, novels, plays, films, or television series that seem to you to belong in each of these categories, and discuss with others how these kinds of stories have changed and how they have remained the same over the past century.
2. As you develop these two sets of works, look to see which of them were written by women (like Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper”) and which by men (like Dreiser’s Sister Carrie). Then and now, what differences do you sense in how women characters and their stories are created by women and how they are handled by men?
