The Life and Work of Charlotte Perkins Gilman - Case Study Example

Charlotte Gilman (1860-1935)_________________________________________________ BIOGRAPHY Charlotte Perkins Gilman was a novelist, sociologist and a prominent feminist of her era. Born in Connecticut on July 3rd 1860, Charlotte was a huge asset to America. Charlotte Gilman was the only daughter of Fredrick Perkins and Mary Ann Fitch, she was the great niece of Harriet Beecher Stowe who was a well renowned author. Gilman’s father walked out on his family leaving them in a miserable condition and forcing them to move in with a relative from time to time. During these hard times, Charlotte Gilman and her mother moved in with Harriet Beecher Stowe too. Gilman’s mother was a very cold mother, denying her daughter any affection in order to make them emotionally independent in her view. Her mother would show her affection only when she thought her daughter had gone to sleep. Her mother forbade Gilman to read fiction books to keep her away from a world of fantasies and expectations making her interested in non-fiction books. What’s interesting; however is that the economic conditions of the family made it hard for her to receive a formal education and much of the things she knew and learned were on her own efforts and her continuous visits to the library due to her undying love for reading books. Gilman made few friends, all coming from intellectual families, well known in the area. Years later her father contacted her, trying for reconciliation with his long lost daughter that was the time when he monetarily helped her, and got her an admission in a design school in Rhode Island. She helped others in expressing ideas creatively. By 1883, Gilman had few of her poems published in various well known journals. Charlotte Gilman married to Charles Walter Stetson in 1884, after being courted by him for a long time. A few months into the marriage, Gilman learned about her pregnancy. After the birth of her daughter Katharine Beecher Stetson, Charlotte showed signs of depression. These symptoms were quickly forgotten and weren’t given much attention by many since women were considered as very sensitive in the society then. At that time, for a woman to get a treatment that too for depression was highly unusual but still, Dr. Silas Weir Mitchell gave Charlotte the attention she deserved and gave her the “rest cure”. The rest cure had Gilman sent home where she was asked to rest, spend time with her baby, stay away from writing and have a minimum of the intellectual life. Gilman however dropped out of the treatment unable to tolerate it after just a few months since it brought her close to an emotional collapse. This treatment is said to have inspired her famous published work of 1982, “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 that there was nothing much the matter with me, and sent me home with solemn advice to live as domestic a life as possible, to have but two hours intelligent life a day, and never to touch pen, brush or pencil again as long as I lived. This was in 1887…" (Gilman, "Why I Wrote the Yellow Wall-paper”) Charlotte took an unusual step for that time by separating from her husband; they both were legally divorced by 1984. This happened due to a mutual consent, and realized that in order for Charlotte to regain her sanity, divorce was mandatory so to adversely affect the lives that revolved around Charlotte as less as possible. Charlotte with her daughter, Katherine, moved to Pasadena and took special interest in reformist organizations which were famous for their feminist movements. She had jobs writing and editing the bulletins and kept writing throughout her stay there. Being a liberalist, Gilman believed that Katherine had every right to experience her father’s love and that Charles had the right to be with his daughter, so she sent Katherine in 1984 to her father who by then had remarried a close friend of Charlotte Gilman. Charlotte always was happy for the couple and showed no signs of remorse. After the death of Charlotte Gilman’s mother, she moved back to Rhode Island and contacted her cousin Houghton Gilman who was a Wall Street attorney then. The two quickly became involved with each other romantically and spent a lot of time together, Gillman in her diaries too described him as a very “pleasurable young man”. They got married in 1900 and moved to New York. Houghton Gilman died in 1934 due to a cerebral hemorrhage. Gilman herself got diagnosed with breast cancer in 1932. Gilman supported the cause euthanasia and committed suicide in 1935 by taking an overdose of chloroform. Her suicide note said she would always prefer chloroform over cancer. “Death? Why this fuss about death? Use your imagination; try to visualize a world without death! Death is the essential condition of life, not an evil” (Gilman) She died in 1935 in Pasadena in the state of California. (Davis) MAJOR WORKS AND THEMES Charlotte mastered in a number of writing styles she loved both, fiction and nonfiction work. It is said that mostly even with fiction writings she mostly projected her thoughts and feelings. This little storied were often thought provoking and caused shifts in attitudes of the readers. Her most notable work has been considered as the “The Yellow Wallpaper” which she wrote on June 7th in Pasadena in 1980. It was quickly published in 1980 only a year and half later of its creation. This quickly became the best seller of Feminist Press publishing house. Ever since its first appearance in 1980, her story, The Yellow Wallpaper has been published in a number of magazines and journals and even in a number of textbooks for students of various age groups. The publications however, have been altered from their original form for a one or another reason. The major theme of this work revolved around a woman suffering from mental illness, who had been shun by her own husband and was left alone in a room for three months only attempting to “improve her health”. This woman being stranded in the room becomes obsessed with the rooms yellow wallpaper which for a normal person was quite disgusting. (Gilman). This story was written to make society aware that women were more than feeble creatures in the world and that anyone could develop an actual mental illness. The theme of madness is greatly involved in this story plot showing how the lady becomes from a reclusive to a maniac all due to the negligence and ignorance of her husband who happened to be her doctor too.  It is not that women are really smaller-minded, weaker-minded, more timid and vacillating, but that whosoever, man or woman, lives always in a small, dark place, is always guarded, protected, directed and restrained, will become inevitably narrowed and weakened by it. The woman is narrowed by the home and the man is narrowed by the woman. (Gilman) Charlotte wanted the society to give more attention to the patients, their individual needs and properly formalized treatments for each patient for his or her health. She said "There is no female mind. The brain is not an organ of sex. Might as well speak of a female liver" (Davis). The story was narrated by her doctor, who happened to be her husband too, gave her quite the opposite treatments to what she actually required and needed. Gilman sent a copy of this story to her doctor, Dr. Silas Weir Mitchell who was trying to cure Gilman by giver her a rest cure. Charlotte Gilman was very enthusiastic about women rights. She is best known for her fiction work in order to raise voice for feminist alleviation. Charlotte believed that girls from a very tender age were constrained. They were forced to feel different by how they dressed and which toys they played with and even what games they played. The girl from a very tender age was being trained to become the usual figure that the society approved of. Being a tomboy herself in her early days, she advocated that tomboys were the true beings who dressed and did whatever and however they wanted. She stated that the society was androcentric, keeping the masculine pint of view as the center of each argument, undermining what females had to offer. “In our steady insistence on proclaiming sex-distinction we have grown to consider most human attributes as masculine attributes, for the simple reason that they were allowed for men and forbidden to women.” (Gilman) She believed that women stopped their research, their work and their efforts to contribute to the society in any form due to the culture that had developed. She believed if the conditions were not made better, it would have caused disastrous results and could have deteriorated the society completely. "Every kind of creature is developed by the exercise of its functions. If denied the exercise of its functions, it cannot develop in the fullest degree." (Gilman) “Women and Economics” was published in 1898; this stated that women needed to be economically free and independent. She stated that women gratified her husband sexually and was rewarded by her an with money, she said that once this relationship was broken, a woman was able to earn and support herself, that is when the woman life would improve and the frustrations causing many fights in married couples would reduce greatly. Work such as “The Home: Its Work and Influence”, “Human Work” and “Does a Man Support his Wife”, published in 1903, 1904 and 1915 respectively are few of the many works that Charlotte Gilman the feminist wrote. She believed that a man should help a woman in domestic work and continuously wrote of issues faced by women. She even wrote poetry to captivate a larger group of audience towards these issues. “When the mother of the race is free, we shall have a better world, by the easy right of birth and by the calm, slow, friendly forces of evolution.”(Gilman) Charlotte Gilman wrote in Sociology journals too, writing about equality of rights for all races and shunning the white dominance over the black. CRITICAL RECEPTION AND REPUTATION The Yellow Wallpaper has received a number or reviews from different people and backgrounds. There were outcries and there were support calls from different people. Those who wanted to progress and wanted to make the society a better place for women were in full support of Charlotte Gilman’s work. There were many patients who suffered from mental illness of various intensities who believed that what Gilman had written was nothing but the truth. Various critics said that the writing brought no pleasure to them as a reader but those who had been victim of such mental illness could be badly hurt by reading such words. Other patients, who had a mental illness in their genes would be in grave danger and may even put their life in danger after reading such blunt work. The critics felt that even thought it was close to Charlotte’s heart and was the truth; the work should have been censored and should have been reviewed before publishing so the larger masses stayed unhurt. However many men and women who were working for feminist upholding or were sensitive towards this issue were deeply moved by the work produced my Charlotte. They understood the life of a woman, being considered derogatory and agreed that this was the reason why a woman was more likely to form mental illness. An important take on Charlotte Gilmore came in 1900 when a critic wrote that only a woman’s fear was her decline from the society. The critic went on to criticize Charlotte saying that she had leaded a conflicting life throughout the years. She agonized marriage, divorced her husband, sent away her daughter and still staged such large protests against the structure of families and the bonding between family members when she herself was a failure to keep together her family. She developed breast cancer but could not imagine it taking her life so instead killed herself using chloroform. Gilman was complex and due to her bad childhood was confused and could not entirely state her complete mind frame. Her beliefs were originated largely from her biased past, and often her statements shifted or changed and at times even differentiated in severity. In her autobiography, she writes "unfortunately my views on the sex question do not appeal to the Freudian complex of today, nor are people satisfied with a presentation of religion as a help in our tremendous work of improving this world." (Gilman) BIBLIOGRAPHY Noteworthy publishing’s by Charlotte Perkins Gilman Why Women Do Not Reform Their Dress. Womans Journal Oct 9, 1886: Circumstances Alter Cases. Kate Fields Washington July 23, 1890. The Yellow Wallpaper in New England Magazine, 5 [January], 1892 Women and Economics: A Study of the Economic Relation Between Men and Women as a Factor in Social Evolution. Boston: Small, Maynard & Co. 1898 The Home: Its Work and Influence.  New York: McClure, Phillips & Co. 1903 Suffrage Songs and Verses. New York: Charlton Co., 1911. Herland.. 1915 The Man-Made World; or, Our Andocentric Culture. New York: Charlton Co. 1911 His Religion and Hers: A Study of the Faith of Our Fathers and the Work of Our Mothers. NY and London: Century Co., 1923 The Living of Charlotte Perkins Gilman: An Autobiography. New York and London: D. Appleton-Century Co. 1935 Literary criticisms on Charlotte Perkins Gilman Davis, Cynthia J. “‘The World Was Home for Me’: Charlotte Perkins Gilman and the Sentimental Public Sphere.” Arizona Quarterly 66 (Spring 2010): 63–86. Print Davis, Cynthia J. “Love and Economics: Charlotte Perkins Gilman on ‘The Woman Question.’”American Transcendental Quarterly 19 (December 2005): 243–258. Print. Deborah M. De Simone; “Charlotte Perkins Gilman and the Feminization of Education.” From The Women in Literature and Life Assembly Volume IV, 13-17. Print. Dock, Julie B. The Yellow Wall-Paper: A Critical Edition and Commentary Casebook. np: Pittsburgh Pennsylvania State UP, 1998 Gilbert, Sandra M., and Susan Gubar. “‘Fecundate! Discriminate!’: Charlotte Perkins Gilman and the Theologizing of Maternity.” In Charlotte Perkins Gilman: Optimist Reformer. Edited by Jill Rudd and Val Gough, 200–216. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1999. Gilbert, Sandra M.; and Susan Gubar. From “The Madwoman in the Attic, the landmark work of feminist literary criticism” published in 1979. On madness and female authorship in "The Yellow Wallpaper”. Print. Heilmann, Ann. “Overwriting Decadence: Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Oscar Wilde, and the Feminization of Art in ‘The Yellow Wall-Paper.’” In The Mixed Legacy of Charlotte Perkins Gilman. Edited by Catherine J. Golden and Joanna Zangrando, 175–188. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2000.  Lane, Ann J. To Herland and Beyond: The Life and Work of Charlotte Perkins Gilman. NY: Pantheon, 1990. Lant, Kathleen Margaret. “The Rape of the Text: Charlotte Gilman’s Violation of Herland.”Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature 9 (1990): 291–308. Print. Thrailkill, Jane F. “Doctoring ‘The Yellow Wallpaper.’” ELH 69 (Summer 2002): 525–566.Print. REFERENCES Biography.com,. N.p., 2015. Web. 26 Apr. 2015. Davis, Cynthia J. Charlotte Perkins Gilman. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2010. Print. Digital.library.upenn.edu,. Bibliography: Works By Charlotte Perkins Gilman. N.p., 2015. Web. 26 Apr. 2015. Gilman, Charlotte Perkins. The Living Of Charlotte Perkins Gilman. Madison, Wis.: University of Wisconsin Press, 1991. Print. Gilman, Charlotte Perkins. The Yellow Wallpaper. [Waiheke Island]: Floating Press, 2009. Print. Lant, Kathleen Margaret. The Rape Of The Text: Charlotte Gilmans Violation Of Herland. Tulsa Studies in Womens Literature 9.2 (1990): 291. Web. 26 Apr. 2015. Literaryhistory.com,. Charlotte Perkins Gilman Literary Criticism. N.p., 2015. Web. 26 Apr. 2015. Times Higher Education,. The Feminism Of Charlotte Perkins Gilman: Sexualities, Histories, Progressivism. N.p., 2009. Web. 26 Apr. 2015. Read More