Charlotte Perkins Gilman

Paper Summary:

This paper explains that Charlotte Perkins Gilman suffered from postpartum depression (PPD) in the 19th century; her semi-autobiographical story "The Yellow Wallpaper" offers significant insights into her anguish. The author relates that "The Yellow Wallpaper" ,which follows Gilman's early married life, begins with the narrator and her husband John traveling to a secluded country estate for their summer vacation. Similar to Gilman, the narrator suffers from depression and it is hoped that this break will provide a cure. The paper states that Gilman as an author of 28 books, literary critic and speaker, signals a crucial transition from the nineteenth-century model of the domestic ideal to the twentieth-century paradigm of the new family.

From the Paper:

"In 1884, Gilman married a fellow artist, Charles Stetson, disregarding her own reservations about combining marriage and career as well as her husband's personal problems. When she delivered her daughter, Katherine, in 1885, she had a severe psychological breakdown. Dr. S. Weir Mitchell, known as one of the greatest nerve specialists of the time, recommended the "rest cure" he had invented for Civil War shell-shock victims and then used for the "nervous prostration" of the "businessman exhausted from too much work and the society woman exhausted from too much play." Gilman underwent a month-long cure in 1887."

More papers on Charlotte Perkins Gilman:

• Book Review # 94713 : "Charlotte Perkins Gilman's "The Yellow Wallpaper"
• Book Review # 111850 : "Charlotte Perkins Gilman's "The Yellow Wallpaper"
• Term Paper # 110611 : "Charlotte Perkins Gilman"

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