The Yellow Wallpaper & Herland

THE YELLOW WALLPAPER & HERLAND

Charlotte Perkins Gilman

Copyright

William Collins

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This eBook first published in Great Britain by William Collins in 2022

Life & Times section © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd

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Classic Literature: Words and Phrases adapted from Collins English Dictionary

The text in this edition follows that of the original publication.

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Source ISBN: 9780008527921

Ebook Edition © January 2022 ISBN: 9780008527945

Version: 2021-12-23

CONTENTS

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

History of William Collins

Life and Times

The Yellow Wallpaper

Herland

CHAPTER 1. A Not Unnatural Enterprise

CHAPTER 2. Rash Advances

CHAPTER 3. A Peculiar Imprisonment

CHAPTER 4. Our Venture

CHAPTER 5. A Unique History

CHAPTER 6. Comparisons Are Odious

CHAPTER 7. Our Growing Modesty

CHAPTER 8. The Girls of Herland

CHAPTER 9. Our Relations and Theirs

CHAPTER 10. Their Religions and Our Marriages

CHAPTER 11. Our Difficulties

CHAPTER 12. Expelled

Classic Literature: Words and Phrases

About the Publisher

History of William Collins

In 1819, millworker William Collins from Glasgow, Scotland, set up a company for printing and publishing pamphlets, sermons, hymn books and prayer books. That company was Collins and was to mark the birth of HarperCollins Publishers as we know it today. The long tradition of Collins dictionary publishing can be traced back to the first dictionary William co-published in 1825, Greek and English Lexicon. Indeed, from 1840 onwards, he began to produce illustrated dictionaries and even obtained a licence to print and publish the Bible.

Soon after, William published the first Collins novel; however, it was the time of the Long Depression, where harvests were poor, prices were high, potato crops had failed and violence was erupting in Europe. As a result, many factories across the country were forced to close down and William chose to retire in 1846, partly due to the hardships he was facing.

Aged 30, William’s son, William II, took over the business. A keen humanitarian with a warm heart and a generous spirit, William II was truly ‘Victorian’ in his outlook. He introduced new, up-to-date steam presses and published affordable editions of Shakespeare’s works and The Pilgrim’s Progress, making them available to the masses for the first time.

A new demand for educational books meant that success came with the publication of travel books, scientific books, encyclopedias and dictionaries. This demand to be educated led to the later publication of atlases, and Collins also held the monopoly on scripture writing at the time.

In the 1860s Collins began to expand and diversify and the idea of ‘books for the millions’ was developed, although the phrase wasn’t coined until 1907. Affordable editions of classical literature were published, and in 1903 Collins introduced 10 titles in their Collins Handy Illustrated Pocket Novels. These proved so popular that a few years later this had increased to an output of 50 volumes, selling nearly half a million in their year of publication. In the same year, The Everyman’s Library was also instituted, with the idea of publishing an affordable library of the most important classical works, biographies, religious and philosophical treatments, plays, poems, travel and adventure books. This series eclipsed all competition at the time, and the introduction of paperback books in the 1950s helped to open that market and marked a high point in the industry.

HarperCollins is and has always been a champion of the classics, and the current Collins Classics series follows in this tradition – publishing classical literature that is affordable and available to all. Beautifully packaged, highly collectible and intended to be reread and enjoyed at every opportunity.

Life and Times

Charlotte Perkins Gilman wrote obsessively; defiantly, even – as if out for revenge. From her late twenties to her death aged seventy-five, Gilman’s output was prolific: novels, novellas, poems, polemics, political essays, dramas, diaries, an autobiography and dozens of short stories. She lectured widely on social issues and between 1909 and 1916 published a monthly magazine for which she wrote every article, essay and review. She wrote because she wanted to and because she could, and above all because she felt her writing served a purpose. All of which makes it seem extraordinary that Gilman fell into relative obscurity after her death, and is now almost exclusively remembered for one of her earliest publications, a short story of just six thousand words.

An Uncertain Start

Charlotte Perkins was born in 1860 in Connecticut, the youngest of two children. Her mother, Mary, whom she describes in her autobiography as ‘the most passionately domestic of home-worshipping housewives’, had once harboured musical ambitions but was forced into poverty when Charlotte’s father abandoned the family; she sold her piano ‘to pay the butcher’s bill’. In hopes of outrunning her debts, Mary moved the children from house to house, state to state, the trio often wearing all their clothes because ‘it was the easiest way to carry them’. There were few opportunities for Charlotte to attend school, but she taught herself to read, inspired by the literary tastes and connections of her absent father, whose aunt was Harriet Beecher Stowe, author of Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852). He was talked into paying for Charlotte to attend the Rhode Island School of Design, where she finally found the time and independence to make firm friends and earn her own money as an artist and tutor.

‘Utter Mental Ruin’

When Charlotte emerged in the early 1880s from her belated but liberating education, convention inevitably came calling. She somewhat reluctantly agreed to marry artist Charles Walter Stetson in 1884, and gave birth to their daughter, Katharine, in 1885. What followed was a breakdown as distressing as it was transformative.

Suffering from a ‘melancholia’ that would nowadays be recognised as post-partum depression, Charlotte entered treatment under the eminent Dr Silas Weir Mitchell, who prescribed his pioneering ‘rest cure’: ‘Live as domestic a life as possible … Have your child with you all the time … Lie down an hour after each meal. Have but two hours’ intellectual life a day. And never touch pen, brush or pencil as long as you live.’ Assiduously following the doctor’s advice – submitting to being overfed and understimulated, deprived of exercise, intellect and any respite from her baby – she ‘came so near the border line of utter mental ruin that I could see over’.

The resulting emotional collapse was so severe that the only way out for Charlotte was a total overhaul of her life: she left Charles and took Katharine to live in California. The couple later enjoyed an amicable divorce, even when (or indeed because) Charles married Charlotte’s best friend; accepting that her daughter’s ‘second mother was fully as good as the first, better in some ways perhaps’, Charlotte sent Katharine to live with them in 1894.

The Yellow Wallpaper

In a 1913 piece entitled ‘Why I Wrote The Yellow Wallpaper?’ Gilman (now famous and remarried, to Houghton Gilman) describes her salvation from the ministrations of Dr Mitchell as a ‘narrow escape’. Incensed by the mental and physical isolation being routinely forced upon women already at their wits’ end, she poured all her vitriol into the story, which was published in the New England Magazine in 1892.

The Yellow Wallpaper has drawn comparisons with the darker works of Edgar Allan Poe, and is praised for its sparse, concise use of language, its increasingly hysterical exclamation marks, to convey the creeping, inevitable descent into total madness of its narrator, a young mother undergoing a rest cure. Described in frantic snatched moments – for the patient cannot be seen with pen or paper – the attic nursery comes to life in lurid, malodorous detail, from the bars on the windows to the woman lurking in the pattern of the ghastly moonlit wallpaper. On the advice of her husband and brother – both doctors – she is trapped in the attic and in her mind, under orders to rally or be sent to the dreaded Dr Mitchell.

It is a story born out of anger and a need for public revenge, but more than that it is a story about women living lives that are confined – in every possible way – in a world controlled by men. Patronised and coddled but in all meaningful respects neglected, the narrator’s only means of exercising the ‘self-control’ her husband urges to secretly document her own deterioration, to master it, revel in it and ultimately guard it jealously. At least in her madness she no longer need care what men think, nor do what they say.

Unsurprisingly, The Yellow Wallpaper was not universally well received, one reviewer calling it ‘a book to keep away from the young wife’. Of course Gilman ‘sent a copy to the physician who so nearly drove me mad. He never acknowledged it.’

Women’s Work

In her autobiography, published posthumously, Gilman responded to the suggestion that her fiction was somehow divorced from her non-fiction; The Yellow Wallpaper, she wrote, is ‘no more literature than my other stuff, definitely being written with a purpose.’ She stood by it as a weapon for social justice, pointing to (anecdotal) evidence that it had transformed the lives of many women: ‘It was not intended to drive people crazy, but to save people from being driven crazy, and it worked.’

During her lifetime, Gilman was principally known as a writer of non-fiction, notably 1898’s Women and Economics, in which she railed against the blindly accepted status quo that saw women utterly reliant on men for survival – and in turn duty-bound to repay this supposed patronage through domestic drudgery and sex. In it she expounds explicitly on ideas more subtly embraced by her fiction: ‘There is no female mind. The brain is not an organ of sex. [May] As well speak of a female liver.’ This notion of inherent female weakness is riotously sent up – again, with serious purpose – in her most famous full-length novel, Herland, serialised in her magazine The Forerunner in 1915.

Three male students hear rumours of a land inhabited only by women and girls, and rush there brimming with patriarchal pluck (‘Come on, boys – there were some good lookers in that bunch … I’ll get myself elected king in no time.’). But then they discover that the place is not merely civilised but actively utopian, run by women who are strong and efficient, who revere motherhood without the trappings of conventional femininity and have mastered reproduction without the need for sex. For them, the most alien discovery about the outside world is that the women there don’t work – or rather that what they do do all day is not considered work. (‘The children play about,’ says one of the students, ‘and the mother has charge of it all.’)

Certainly Gilman was not advocating for a society without men; rather, she wanted the machine of society to be re-evaluated for the common good – for household work to be seen and respected as work, for it not to be the sole responsibility of the wife, and for women’s financial independence to redraw the contract of marriage as one between two equally useful, industrious people.

Some of Gilman’s views were so anathema to the homely role of wife and mother in the mid-twentieth century that it is perhaps no surprise that she dwindled from cultural significance after her death in 1935. The feminist movement of the 1970s returned her to prominence, with The Yellow Wallpaper reissued by the Feminist Press in 1973 and Herland published for the first in book form in 1979, hailed on its cover as ‘a lost feminist utopian novel’.

Today, criticism of Gilman focuses not on her outspoken fight for women’s rights but on the way in which certain of her ideals veer explicitly into notions of racial purity and even eugenics. She wrote essays about perceived differences in ‘social evolution’ between races, reflected ruefully that poorer women tended to bear many more children than wealthy ones, and in Herland described the utopian community as having evolved so perfectly not through ‘a brute passion, a mere instinct’ but rather through the ‘Conscious Mak[ing] of People’.

Joy in Service

Throughout her writings, Gilman proclaims the importance to humanity of usefulness and work. ‘Work, the normal life of every human being; work, in which is joy and growth and service, without which one is a pauper and a parasite.’ Nothing could deter her from this purpose – not marriage, motherhood or madness. When she learned that breast cancer was about to rob her of her industry, she was determined, as ever, to take matters into her own hands.

‘I had not the least objection to dying,’ she wrote with characteristic candour in her suicide note. ‘But I did not propose to die of this, so I promptly bought sufficient chloroform as a substitute. Human life consists in mutual service. No grief, pain, misfortune or broken heart is excuse for cutting off one’s life while any power of service remains. But when all usefulness is over … it is the simplest of human rights to choose a quick and easy death in place of a slow and horrible one.’

Charlotte Perkins Gilman died in August 1935, and in 1994 was inducted into the National Women’s Hall of Fame.

THE YELLOW WALLPAPER

It is very seldom that mere ordinary people like John and myself secure ancestral halls for the summer.

A colonial mansion, a hereditary estate, I would say a haunted house, and reach the height of romantic felicity—but that would be asking too much of fate!

Still I will proudly declare that there is something queer about it.

Else, why should it be let so cheaply? And why have stood so long untenanted?

John laughs at me, of course, but one expects that in marriage.

John is practical in the extreme. He has no patience with faith, an intense horror of superstition, and he scoffs openly at any talk of things not to be felt and seen and put down in figures.

John is a physician, and perhaps—(I would not say it to a living soul, of course, but this is dead paper and a great relief to my mind)—perhaps that is one reason I do not get well faster.

You see he does not believe I am sick!

And what can one do?

If a physician of high standing, and one’s own husband, assures friends and relatives that there is really nothing the matter with one but temporary nervous depression—a slight hysterical tendency—what is one to do?

My brother is also a physician, and also of high standing, and he says the same thing.

So I take phosphates or phosphites—whichever it is, and tonics, and journeys, and air, and exercise, and am absolutely forbidden to work until I am well again.

Personally, I disagree with their ideas.

Personally, I believe that congenial work, with excitement and change, would do me good.

But what is one to do?

I did write for a while in spite of them; but it does exhaust me a good deal—having to be so sly about it, or else meet with heavy opposition.

I sometimes fancy that in my condition if I had less opposition and more society and stimulus—but John says the very worst thing I can do is to think about my condition, and I confess it always makes me feel bad.

So I will let it alone and talk about the house.

The most beautiful place! It is quite alone, standing well back from the road, quite three miles from the village. It makes me think of English places that you read about, for there are hedges and walls and gates that lock, and lots of separate little houses for the gardeners and people.

There is a delicious garden! I never saw such a garden—large and shady, full of box-bordered paths, and lined with long grape-covered arbors with seats under them.

There were greenhouses, too, but they are all broken now.

There was some legal trouble, I believe, something about the heirs and co-heirs; anyhow, the place has been empty for years.

That spoils my ghostliness, I am afraid; but I don’t care—there is something strange about the house—I can feel it.

I even said so to John one moonlight evening, but he said what I felt was a draught, and shut the window.

I get unreasonably angry with John sometimes. I’m sure I never used to be so sensitive. I think it is due to this nervous condition.

But John says if I feel so, I shall neglect proper self-control; so I take pains to control myself—before him, at least and that makes me very tired.

I don’t like our room a bit. I wanted one downstairs that opened on the piazza and had roses all over the window, and such pretty old-fashioned chintz hangings! but John would not hear of it.

He said there was only one window and not room for two beds, and no near room for him if he took another.

He is very careful and loving, and hardly lets me stir without special direction.

I have a schedule prescription for each hour in the day; he takes all care from me, and so I feel basely ungrateful not to value it more.

He said we came here solely on my account, that I was to have perfect rest and all the air I could get. Your exercise depends on your strength, my dear, said he, and your food somewhat on your appetite; but air you can absorb all the time. So we took the nursery at the top of the house.

It is a big, airy room, the whole floor nearly, with windows that look all ways, and air and sunshine galore. It was nursery first and then playroom and gymnasium, I should judge; for the windows are barred for little children, and there are rings and things in the walls.

The paint and paper look as if a boys’ school had used it. It is stripped off—the paper—in great patches all around the head of my bed, about as far as I can reach, and in a great place on the other side of the room low down. I never saw a worse paper in my life.

One of those sprawling flamboyant patterns committing every artistic sin.

It is dull enough to confuse the eye in following, pronounced enough to constantly irritate and provoke study, and when you follow the lame, uncertain curves for a little distance they suddenly commit suicide—plunge off at outrageous angles, destroy themselves in unheard of contradictions.

The color is repellant, almost revolting; a smouldering, unclean yellow, strangely faded by the slow-turning sunlight.

It is a dull yet lurid orange in some places, a sickly sulphur tint in others.

No wonder the children hated it! I should hate it myself if I had to live in this room long.

There comes John, and I must put this away,—he hates to have me write a word.

We have been here two weeks, and I haven’t felt like writing before, since that first day.

I am sitting by the window now, up in this atrocious nursery, and there is nothing to hinder my writing as much as I please, save lack of strength.

John is away all day, and even some nights when his cases are serious.

I am glad my case is not serious!

But these nervous troubles are dreadfully depressing.

John does not know how much I really suffer. He knows there is no reason to suffer, and that satisfies him.

Of course it is only nervousness. It does weigh on me so not to do my duty in any way!

I meant to be such a help to John, such a real rest and comfort, and here I am a comparative burden already!

Nobody would believe what an effort it is to do what little I am able,—to dress and entertain, and order things.

It is fortunate Mary is so good with the baby. Such a dear baby!

And yet I cannot be with him, it makes me so nervous.

I suppose John never was nervous in his life. He laughs at me so about this wallpaper!

At first he meant to repaper the room, but afterwards he said that I was letting it get the better of me, and that nothing was worse for a nervous patient than to give way to such fancies.

He said that after the wallpaper was changed it would be the heavy bedstead, and then the barred windows, and then that gate at the head of the stairs, and so on.

You know the place is doing you good, he said, and really, dear, I don’t care to renovate the house just for a three months’ rental.

Then do let us go downstairs, I said, there are such pretty rooms there.

Then he took me in his arms and called me a blessed little goose, and said he would go down to the cellar if I wished, and have it whitewashed into the bargain.

But he is right enough about the beds and windows and things.

It is an airy and comfortable room as any one need wish, and, of course, I would not be so silly as to make him uncomfortable just for a whim.

I’m really getting quite fond of the big room, all but that horrid paper.

Out of one window I can see the garden, those mysterious deep-shaded arbors, the riotous old-fashioned flowers, and bushes and gnarly trees.

Out of another I get a lovely view of the bay and a little private wharf belonging to the estate. There is a beautiful shaded lane that runs down there from the house. I always fancy I see people walking in these numerous paths and arbors, but John has cautioned me not to give way to fancy in the least. He says that with my imaginative power and habit of story-making a nervous weakness like mine is sure to lead to all manner of excited fancies, and that I ought to use my will and good sense to check the tendency. So I try.

I