3 - Critique of liberalism

Summary

After five years of marriage and the birth of a child, the American writer and lecturer, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, produced a short story. Entitled ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’, the piece describes the terrifying tale of a woman going mad, driven to animal behaviour by her irrational fixation on the pattern in the wallpaper of her room. The story is brief, written in short clipped sentences, and tells with clarity and detail of one person's progressive mental breakdown. The first potential publisher refused the piece, claiming that no one else should be made as miserable as he was upon reading the story, and indeed when it was finally published in The New England Magazine in 1892, it was received with cautious praise. There was little that was morally uplifting about the story, so it could not be used as an educational tool for reinforcing social values, yet it was recognised as a competent and medically accurate account of the details of ‘incipient insanity’. Because it had qualities similar to works in the horror-story genre, it was to be included in anthologies of works by Edgar Allen Poe and others, as a chilling description of madness caused by obsession with physical objects.

The author was a woman of true New England grit, who learned independence and a strong sense of responsibility and duty at an early age.