Yellow Wallpaper & Herland
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‘There are things in that wallpaper that nobody knows about but me, or ever will’
Hailed as one of the most distinctive and compelling literary voices of her era, Charlotte Perkins Gilman is praised today for her ground-breaking, feminist writing. Collected here, both The Yellow Wallpaper and Herland are extraordinary for scrutinising the patriarchal norms of turn-of-the-century America.
In The Yellow Wallpaper a woman frantically paces the empty nursery at the top of a secluded mansion. Her husband John, a physician, is of no comfort and she can’t bear to sit with the new baby as his crying makes her much too nervous. And then there’s the putrid, yellow wallpaper which seems to shift and creep around the room before her very eyes…
Herland, first published in 1915, follows a group of three men as they arrive in a female-only society. Peace and tranquillity thrive in this utopian land, forcing the explorers to question how their own corrupted, male-dominated world can survive.
Charlotte Perkins Gilman (born 1860, Connecticut, U.S.) was a leading American feminist, lecturer, writer and publisher who was at the forefront of the women’s movement in the United States. The Yellow Wallpaper, her shortest, but most famous work, remains an important document of nineteenth-century attitudes towards women’s mental health. Perkins Gilman died at the age of seventy-five in 1935.