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  • "The Yellow Wallpaper" by Charlotte Perkins Gilman: A Dual Text Critical Edition
  • Charlotte Rich
"The Yellow-Wallpaper" by Charlotte Perkins Gilman: A Dual Text Critical Edition. Ed. Shawn St. Jean. Athens: Ohio Univ. Press, 2006. 144 pp. Cloth, $42.95; paper, $21.95.

In recent years, several important editions of Charlotte Perkins Gilman's widely taught story that variously contextualize and/or offer compositional histories have appeared, among them Dale M. Bauer's The Yellow Wallpaper: A Bedford Cultural Edition (1998), Julie Bates Dock's Charlotte Perkins Gilman's "The Yellow Wall-Paper" and the History of its Publication and Reception: A Critical Edition and Documentary Casebook (1998), and Catherine J. Golden's Charlotte Perkins Gilman's The Yellow Wall-Paper: A Sourcebook and Critical Edition (2004). In what might seem well-covered ground, Shawn St. Jean's "The Yellow Wall-Paper" by Charlotte Perkins Gilman: A Dual-Text Critical Edition nonetheless provides an important complement to these volumes. In particular, in focusing upon the compositional and textual history of the story, St. Jean's edition might be assumed to cover similar territory as Dock's volume, but he takes an importantly distinct approach. In contrast to Dock's argument for the 1892 New England Magazine printing (which significantly differs from the manuscript version in Gilman's papers at the Schlesinger Library) as the primary version of the story, one that St. Jean asserts is based on the social constructionist theoretical premise that "the creative process is self-consciously collaborative," his introduction instead suggests that Gilman's story is best understood and appreciated in both its manuscript and first-published versions. Building on the belief that "multiple-text editions … open up new possibilities for doing justice to works," he argues that "the two texts edited and presented here are both worth reading: Gilman's manuscript version as the result of an isolated, author-only compositional process; the New England Magazine version as an artifact reflecting the print and popular culture of 1890s America."

The volume contains thorough and meticulous textual-studies apparatus, including lists of both substantive and accidental variants between the [End Page 176] manuscript and first published versions of the text (as well as substantive variants in the 1899 chapbook edition), a list of editorial emendations, and a timeline concerning the story's composition and publication. However, St. Jean's edition is unique in offering scholars and students, in parallel page format, both the New England Magazine printing and the far less accessible manuscript version of the story (as he notes, the only previous edition to have used the manuscript as copy-text is Denise D. Knight's "The Yellow Wall-Paper" and Selected Stories of Charlotte Perkins Gilman [1994]). Also, drawing on material that Catherine Golden discovered and first made widely available in The Captive Imagination: A Casebook on The Yellow Wallpaper (1992), this volume includes the essential extra-textual component of the three illustrations accompanying the New England Magazine publication.

Furthermore, St. Jean complements the textual apparatus with four new essays that emphasize the existence of the story's multiple versions in their approaches. Catherine J. Golden's "Speaking a Different Story: The Illustrated Text" explores the New England Magazine version of the story in relation to its illustrations and other bibliographic codes. Noting the importance of visual elements that accompanied the original publication of many Victorian texts, Golden concludes that "in the 1892 New England Magazine text, bibliographical features commonly used in turn-of-the-century periodicals come readily to the 'attention of our eyes' and bias our interpretation of the story." Denise D. Knight's "'I am getting angry enough to do something desperate': The Question of Female 'Madness,'" countering the oft-made critical claim for the narrator's descent into insanity, suggests that "the narrator's behavior at the end of the story may not be a form of insanity but rather a deliberate act of rebellion." Knight compellingly supports her argument through close scrutiny of changes between the manuscript and published versions of the text. Allan H. Pasco's "Crazy Writing and Reliable Text" conversely theorizes that the manuscript version of Gilman's story supports an interpretation of the narrator...

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