Why+I+Wrote+the+Yellow+Wallpaper

Charlotte Perkins Gilman, "Why I Wrote //The Yellow Wallpaper//" (1913)
This article originally appeared in the October 1913 issue of //The Forerunner//.

Many and many a reader has asked that. When the story first came out, in the //New England Magazine// about 1891, a Boston physician made protest in //The Transcript//. Such a story ought not to be written, he said; it was enough to drive anyone mad to read it. Another physician, in Kansas I think, wrote to say that it was the best description of incipient insanity he had ever seen, and--begging my pardon--had I been there? Now the story of the story is this: 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. 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; work, in which is joy and growth and service, without which one is a pauper and a parasite--ultimately recovering some measure of power. Being naturally moved to rejoicing by this narrow escape, I wrote //The Yellow Wallpaper//, with its embellishments and additions, to carry out the ideal (I never had hallucinations or objections to my mural decorations) and sent a copy to the physician who so nearly drove me mad. He never acknowledged it. The little book is valued by alienists and as a good specimen of one kind of literature. It has, to my knowledge, saved one woman from a similar fate--so terrifying her family that they let her out into normal activity and she recovered. But the best result is this. Many years later I was told that the great specialist had admitted to friends of his that he had altered his treatment of neurasthenia since reading //The Yellow Wallpaper//. It was not intended to drive people crazy, but to save people from being driven crazy, and it worked.

//Prepared by Professor Catherine Lavender for courses in The Department of History, The College of Staten Island of The City University of New York. Last modified: Tuesday 8 June 1999.

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