How Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Life Influenced Her Writing

Violante Mendes

Prof. Doutor Reinaldo Silva

Literatura Inglesa

17 December 2015

How Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s life influenced her writing

Charlotte Perkins Gilman was a great woman, who marked the world for what she wrote and for what she did concerning women in the beginning of the 20th century. She was born on July 3, 1860 and her childhood was marked by the lack of affection that her mother showed for her. She grew up in Providence, Rhode Island and attended public schools until she dropped out at 15, despite her teachers describing her as brilliant in most subjects. At the age of 18 she enrolled in a business school funded by her father. Charlotte Perkins Gilman married Charles Walter Stetson in 1884 and in the year after she gave birth to her daughter, Katharine Beecher Stetson. Charlotte suffered from post-partum depression and that led to the end of her marriage. She left her daughter with her husband and his new wife and moved to California, where she really began her writing career. But all that she had lived so far and all the she then began to believe in contributed and influenced the themes and the way of her writing.

        Charlotte truly became a writer after she moved to California with her daughter. She wasn’t able to write when she was married because of the deep depression she was in, that prevented her to be herself and to even do something for herself, as she would “lay on the lounge and weep all day. The tears ran down into my ears on either side. I went to bed crying, woke in the night crying, sat on the edge of the bed in the morning and cried — from sheer continuous pain.” (Perkins 91).

In California, Charlotte began to be interested on several women’s rights movements and started participating in clubs and conventions. One year after she moved, she had a blow of inspiration and wrote several poems, novels, essays and her most famous short story, The Yellow Wallpaper.

Charlotte wrote The Yellow Wallpaper to share her experience with depression and the treatment that she was advised to do, the “rest cure”, by Dr. Silas Weir Michel. Charlotte was on the verge of an emotional breakdown due to this treatment, as she describes in her article “Why I Wrote the Yellow Wallpaper”:

For many years I suffered from a severe and continuous nervous breakdown tending to melancholia--and beyond. During about the third year of this trouble I went, in devout faith and some faint stir of hope, to a noted specialist in nervous diseases, the best known in the country. This wise man put me to bed and applied the rest cure, to which a still-good physique responded so promptly that he concluded there was nothing much the matter with me, and sent me home with solemn advice to "live as domestic a life as far as possible," to "have but two hours' intellectual life a day," and "never to touch pen, brush, or pencil again" as long as I lived. This was in 1887.

I went home and obeyed those directions for some three months, and came so near the borderline of utter mental ruin that I could see over.

Charlotte only recovered because, with the little sanity she had left, she decided to do the opposite of what her doctor had told her:

Then, using the remnants of intelligence that remained, and helped by a wise friend, I cast the noted specialist's advice to the winds and went to work again--work, the normal life of every human being; (…) --ultimately recovering some measure of power.

 She then divorced her husband, moved to another place and started to have an active intellectual and social life. In a few months she was almost fully recovered, although she would have to live with depression for the rest of her life. Years later Charlotte comes to know that “the great specialist had admitted to friends of his that he had altered his treatment of neurasthenia since reading The Yellow Wallpaper.”

Charlotte ends her explanation on why she wrote The Yellow Wallpaper with the realization that the objective of the short story was accomplished “It was not intended to drive people crazy, but to save people from being driven crazy, and it worked.”

The Yellow Wallpaper was one of the most recognized works of Charlotte Perkins Gilman, in raising awareness for a treatment that was clearly not working and in giving a voice to women. However, Charlotte Perkins Gilman wrote several other poems and novels about women and the feminist movement, such as “The Home: Its Work and Influence” where she points out that the environment in which the woman lives and works in, be it at home or not, was to oppressive and should be changed to suit the woman and to protect their mental states.