Wild Unrest: Charlotte Perkins Gilman and the Making of “The Yellow Wall-Paper” (review)

Since its recovery by the Feminist Press thirty years ago, Gilman’s “The Yellow Wall-Paper” has received robust scholarly attention from literary critics, historians, and sociologists. To this conversation, Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz adds Wild Unrest, which she calls an attempt to “read ‘The Yellow Wall-Paper’ in light of its author’s experiences of love, ambition, and depression in her twenties . . . [and to] put aside the myths that Gilman created about ‘The Yellow Wall-Paper’ to present her at the time as she understood herself and as she was portrayed by others close to her.”

Wild Unrest begins with Gilman’s childhood and chronicles her courtship and marriage to the painter Walter Stetson, her first forays into publishing, her breakdown after the birth of their daughter Katharine, and her treatment under Dr. S. Weir Mitchell of rest cure renown. While she refers in her introduction to the “wealth of important scholarship on Gilman since the 1970s,” Horowitz does not situate her own project in relation to this body of work, much of which discusses Gilman’s private life and the very conflicts on which Horowitz focuses: the struggle for financial independence, the pressures of domesticity, the desire for a fully-realized sexuality. It is particularly striking that she does not mention Cynthia Davis’ recent Charlotte Perkins Gilman: A Biography (2010).

With an enunciated focus on Gilman’s private life, Horowitz refers to Gilman simply as “Charlotte” and quotes generously from private letters and diaries throughout the book. It is pleasure to read these materials, as Gilman wrote with passion about her frustrations and her contradictory desires to fulfill conventional gender norms and to maintain her independence. In a letter to her soon-to-be husband, she writes, “What ails me now I cannot say: I have lost my love as one loses a quotation familiar as the Lord’s Prayer—knowing it to be there but unable to find it” (original emphasis). Reading such intimate materials, the reader comes to know the young Gilman quite well.

However, given the title and stated aim of this book to shed new light on the “making of ‘The Yellow Wall-Paper,’” Horowitz misses many opportunities to connect Gilman’s early life to her most famous work. For example, she makes much of Gilman’s lifelong investment in gymnastics and “reform physiology” but does not remark upon the fact that her most famous work deals centrally with bed rest in a room—with ‘rings and things’ in the walls—that resonates with a gymnasium. Similarly, Horowitz provides an extended discussion of Gilman’s interest in popular science, especially Herbert Spencer, but she does not suggest how these intellectual concerns might manifest in Gilman’s fiction. Horowitz devotes pages to Gilman’s same-sex passions, particularly her relationship to her childhood friend Martha Luther, but these intimacies are never read in relation to the story, which readily lends itself to a lesbian reading.

Ultimately, Wild Unrest reads more like the biography of Gilman’s life, a kind or portrait of the writer as a young woman, than a scholarly work on “The Yellow Wall-Paper” or the culture out of which it was written. In fact, Horowitz devotes less than forty pages to “The Yellow Wall-Paper” itself, and most of those pages merely summarize the well-known plot. Horowitz might have situated the young Gilman in relation to other cultural developments, such as suffrage, immigration, and economics, all of which Gilman cared about deeply. Or she might have connected the writer’s early life to her sizable and wide-ranging body of work to help us more fully grasp Gilman’s deep investments in nativism, women’s rights, socialism, and design. While it is enjoyable to read more of Gilman’s private writing and correspondence, Wild Unrest is not likely to bring new insights to readers well-versed in existing scholarship. [End...