Charlotte Perkins Gilman's "The Yellow Wallpaper" and the History of Its Publication and Reception: A Critical Edition and Documentary Casebook by Julie Bates Dock (review)

Julie Bates Dock, ed. Charlotte Perkins Gilman's "The Yellow Wallpaper "and the History ofIts Publication andReception:A Critical Edition andDocumentary Casebook. The Penn State Series in the History ofthe Book. General Editor, James L. W West III. University Park, PA: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1998. 132p. Neila C. Seshachari Weber State University This slender casebook ofan academic search turns out to be extraordinary in its reach. It publishes the first authoritative text ofCharlotte Perkins Gilman's "The Yellow Wall-paper" since it was originally published in 1 892 (the versions we have been teaching for decades in our classes have been unauthentic, alas!); it includes book reviews and excerpts of literary and social commentaries that reflect the story's critical reception; it publishes lists ofeditorial emendations and variants of the story in important editions since 1892, and it gives a listing oftextual sources for more than one hundred reprintings ofthe story in anthologies and textbooks. This enterprise itselfdeserves recognition for the prodigious, painstakingscholarship and meticulous editing that have gone into the casebook production. What impressed me most about this book, however, is its origin in an undergraduate course on scholarly editing. Julie Bates Dock gave her class a "simple collation exercise" on Gilman's "The Yellow Wall-paper." Students and teacher were fired up as they looked for relationships among various editions ofthe story. Their growing enthusiasm resulted in a collaborative publication by Julie Bates Dock and three ofher students (Daphne Ryan Allen, Jennifer Palai, and Kristen Tracy) — an article titled "'But One Expects That': Charlotte Perkins Gilman's 'The Yellow Wallpaper' and the Shifting Light of Scholarship" [which appeared in PMLA 1 1 1 (January 1996): 52-65]. Early in a chapter called "The Legend of 'The Yellow Wall-paper," Dock not only recounts how the story has become one ofthe perennial "best-sellers," with 225,000 copies alone of the Feminist Press' slim volume of the story with an Afterword by Elaine R. Hedges, but warns us diat "In its twenty-five-year odyssey ofrediscovery by literary critics, ... the story has picked up along the way an assortment ofblemishes and distortions, from textual anomalies to skewed accounts of its publication history to misinformation about its contemporary reception" (1). This observation is sufficient provocation for any academic to dig into its critical history. The evidence ofcasual distortions that change the import oforiginal texts as shown in the present case emphasizes the importance oftextual criticism and traditional modes ofcriticism. As Dock reiterates sentiments expressed in the origi114 * ROCKY MOUNTAIN REVIEW Hr SPRING 1999 Reviews nal PMLA article, "the use ofdocuments is affected by critical trends and by critics ' biases and expectations___ The feminist critics of the early 1970s, intent on establishing women authors in the American literary canon, had a stake in portraying the story as victimized piece of literature. The notion that Gilman suffered condemnation from editors and readers outside the story tidily echoed the narrator's victimization within the story" (2-3). Dock cites two instances where major feminist critics came to unexamined and hasty conclusions about the publication history of the story: "For almost fifty years," lament Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, "The Yellow Wallpaper went imprinted and unread" [The Norton Anthology ofLiterature by Women: The Tradition in English (NewYork: Norton, 1985): 1 148]. Similarly, Annette Kolodny attributes the story's lack ofinfluence on later women authors to its being "so quickly relegated to the backwaters ofour literary landscape" [? Map for Rereading: or, Gender and rhe Interpretation of Literary Texts,' New Literary History (1980): 45]. The print record belies these claims. (4, emphasis mine) In other instances, Dock provides evidence to argue that omission ofa couple of words — "in marriage" for example, as in "John laughs at me, ofcourse, but one expects that [in marriage]" — distorts Gilman's focus. And she argues that "here she [Gilman] is bashing marriage in particular, not men in general" (7). Other legends of the story that do not hold up well under scrutiny, as Dock points out, are that Gilman had to struggle to get her story into print, that most readers thought of it as a "ghost story," that it received irate reception from the male medical...