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“But One Expects That”: Charlotte Perkins Gilman's “The Yellow Wallpaper” and the Shifting Light of Scholarship

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 October 2020

Julie Bates Dock ,
Daphne Ryan Allen ,
Jennifer Palais  and
Kristen Tracy
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Abstract

When feminist critics of the 1970s rediscovered “The Yellow Wallpaper,” they constructed an interpretation of the story and the history of its publication and reception. Subsequent critics lent authority to an emerging set of accepted “facts”: nineteenth-century audiences read the tale as a ghost story rather than as a critique of the sexual politics of marriage; Gilman fought valiantly against hostility from the entrenched hierarchy of male editors who refused to publish her work; and irate male physicians censured the story once it appeared. By reexamining the documentary evidence on which those “facts” are based, we examine the role that ideology plays in gathering and interpreting evidence. Gilman's story serves as a fine but certainly not a unique example of how scholarship is as grounded in historical biases as the literature it seeks to illuminate.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 111 , Issue 1: Special Topic The Status of Evidence , January 1996 , pp. 52 - 65
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1996

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