In 1892, Charlotte Perkins Stetson, later Gilman, published “The Yellow Wallpaper” in the New England Magazine, an illustrated literary monthly. A semi-autobiographical tale, Gilman’s story relays through her first-person narrator a woman’s postpartum depression and the treatment she receives, modeled on Dr. Silas Weir Mitchell’s “Rest Cure.” Through the narrator’s struggle with what is labeled as a nervous breakdown, Gilman exposes the abuse of the patriarchy by showing how the husband controls the narrator. Gilman was a proponent of women’s rights and pursued a career in writing. She was living proof that women were creative and ambitious and shouldn’t be imprisoned in the home.
SCRIBBLING WOMEN 