Gilman: tell you what I think of you

After the turn of the century, Charlotte Perkins Gilman began producing her own monthly magazine in New York, The Forerunner, which she wrote and edited single-handedly. Although it did well considering it was a one-person production, she often sought to republish her work in periodicals with broader circulation. Such was the case with her story "An Unwilling Interview," first published in The Forerunner in April 1912 and republished in the Woman's Journal (published by Alice Stone Blackwell) on March 29, 1913.

The story features a woman named Ellen Carlyle who has come from rural Idaho to visit her sister, now Mrs. Johnson and living in the big city. But all is not well in the Johnson household. Ellen's newly married nephew Worth Johnson has been the subject of a public scandal. It turns out, the local newspaper publisher is a rival of the elder Mr. Johnson, a reported millionaire, and this rival has created the controversy out of spite. Though Mrs. Johnson acknowledges the publisher's lackey reporters are not directly to blame, her sister notes that they still  should be held responsible.

Aunt Ellen visits the home of her nephew and his wife, an innocent and pretty young shopgirl. While her husband is at work, she has locked herself in her apartment to fend off reporters and photographers, including some who try to trick her. She made the mistake of giving a few quotes, without knowing she was being interviewed, and the publisher has twisted those words into scandal. While Aunt Ellen chats with the bride, a dedicated reporter breaks in through a door using a knife. It turns out to be the same reporter that had tricked her into giving him quotes. Without skipping a beat, he notes the newspaper he represents, and begins his questioning.

Aunt Ellen hardly hesitates before forcing the man into a chair and tying him down. She gives the surprised reporter a stern lecture on the harm he has caused. She says:

"In your original interview with her, by using her innocence and inexperience to gather material from, she herself is made to strike a blow at her husband’s happiness—a refinement of cruelty not used by the Apaches. They torture men and also women, but they do not use the woman to torture the man with. Your master does. In order to accomplish this purpose all common decency must be ignored, all privacy, all delicacy, all respect for personal freedom. This little bride is a prisoner on account of the staring cameras that wait outside. She can not rest because of the noise of her assailants."

Aunt Ellen notes that, though there is no law preventing his behavior, what this reporter and others have done is more than criminal. He begins to blush as he realizes the truth. "Cruel, isn’t it?" she asks, "To tie you up—helpless—and tell you what I think of you." Once the reporter learns his lesson, Aunt Ellen lets him go.

The story, with two "unwilling interviews," was aimed at the journalism style of people like William Randolph Hearst, who stopped at nothing for sensational stories. Gilman, in creating her own independent newspaper, had been striking against the Hearst system and its influence. Due to financial concerns, however, she eventually ceased publishing The Forerunner in 1916.

*I learned much about this independent journal by Gilman, including the date of the republication of "An Unwilling Interview," from Denise D. Knight's essay "Charlotte Perkins Gilman, William Randolph Hearst, and the Practice of Ethical Journalism," collected in Charlotte Perkins Gilman and Her Contemporaries: Literary and Intellectual Contexts (University of Alabama Press, 2004).

Why do we sit here, mother?

The July 19, 1898 issue of Time and the Hour included an article titled "The Twilight" (noted as "An Imitation" of a Belgian named Maurice Maeterlinck). The author of the piece was Charlotte Perkins Gilman. It features a dialogue between a mother, a father, and a child which takes place in a wooded area covered in a "dim half light" with a gloomy castle casting a deep shadow.

The child asks, "Why do we sit here, mother?" When father answers, the child seems confused and asks why his mother did not answer. "He always knows," she responds, with apparent hesitation; the child wonders if he really does. It is too dark, according to the father, and so it is best to sit. But the child is incredulous and says he does not really know. "It does not matter," the mother responds. "He is your father."

The ambiguity in the story makes the reader uncomfortable and the suspense is palpable; both the child and the reader are kept in the dark (pun intended). As night is falling, the child is restless and wants to go to bed. His parents tell him, however, that they cannot go back home. Soon, it is revealed that the father must protect them, and that he has a gun. The child does not believe night is falling, but the day is dawning. And the story ends.

The short article makes an interesting companion to Gilman's more famous work, "The Yellow Wallpaper" (which she wrote about two years later). Though not as grotesque, "The Twilight" gives the reader a feeling of uneasiness and worry. Further, it opens up a feeling of distrust for the male figure, who attempts to subdue the child's free-spirited nature and enthusiasm. One can see this story taking place within view of the window from Gilman's room with its yellow paper.

Howells, Scudder, Gilman: Pretty blood curdling

"The author wished me to send you this," William Dean Howells wrote to Horace Scudder (pictured at left) on October 5, 1890. "It's pretty blood curdling, but strong, and is certainly worth reading." The story Howells sent along with his letter was "The Yellow Wall-Paper" by Charlotte Perkins Gilman.

Scudder, by then, had replaced Howells as editor of The Atlantic Monthly some nine years earlier. Gilman had herself referred to "The Yellow Wall-Paper" as "my awful story," and reported that her husband called it "a ghastly tale... [which] beats Poe and Doré!" She admitted it was "a simple tale, but highly unpleasant."

Scudder, a reverend, apparently agreed. In fact, he found it a bit too ghastly. To Gilman, he wrote a two-sentence letter:

Mr. Howells has handed me this story. I could not forgive myself if I made others as miserable as I have made myself!

This somewhat curt letter was Scudder's only notice to Gilman that he chose not to publish the story in The Atlantic Monthly. It did not see print until the January 1892 issue of The New England Magazine. Howells disagreed with his friend's opinion. In 1920, he included "The Yellow Wall-Paper" in his collection of The Great Modern American Stories.

*For more information, see Charlotte Perkins Gilman's The Yellow Wall-Paper: A Sourcebook and Critical Edition, edited by Catherine J. Golden.

Gilman: no trouble to anyone

Charlotte Perkins Gilman was always suspicious of modern medicine. Her "hysteria" led to her forced "rest therapy," which only made her more frustrated. Her story, "The Yellow Wall-Paper" (1892), fictionalizes her experience. In 1932, she was diagnosed with inoperable breast cancer.

She was living in Pasadena, California at the time, along with her husband (the artist Frank Tolles Chamberlin) and two of their children. She came to the conclusion that her work was done and she was ready to die. She spent the evening of Saturday, August 17, 1935 with her family. She then went to bed, placed a chloroform-soaked screen on her face, and died peacefully in her sleep by 11:30 p.m. She had left a note: "I have preferred chloroform to cancer."

About ten years earlier, in July 1925, Gilman predicted that she had ten years of life left — a shockingly accurate prediction. Her suicide also resembled a fictional one she described in her 1912 book Forerunner. In the book, she noted her approval of the "good taste... in suicide" of a fictional "well-bred" woman who was found in her bed after using chloroform — "no trouble to anyone." In the real-life suicide, Gilman's family did not notify police until Monday; her body was cremated the next day. Her ashes were spread in the San Gabriel Mountains.

Gilman grabbed control of her own life and, in a sense, her death was in accordance with her values. She had been an advocate for women's rights, and her story "The Yellow Wall-Paper," is considered a major work of feminist thought. Fannie Hurst, a novelist, noted that Gilman "died as wisely as she lived." A friend and activist named Hattie Howe wrote of her friend as: "Indomitable, valiant, she was never vanquished, she even conquered death."

Her final work, The Living of Charlotte Perkins Gilman, appeared posthumously in October 1935. Gilman hoped the book would "stir some women" to become "a mover of others."

*Much of the information in this post comes from Cynthia Davis's Charlotte Perkins Gilman: A Biography (2010).

Gilman: The color is repellant

In temperatures reportedly as high as 103 degrees in Pasadena, California, Charlotte Perkins Gilman began writing a short story on June 6, 1890. She completed the story, titled "The Yellow Wallpaper," the next day. A week later, she sent it off to Scribner's. After a couple rejections, it was finally published in the January 1892 issue of The New England Magazine. It was reprinted at least six more times in her lifetime.

"The Yellow Wallpaper" has been claimed as a classic example of a psychological thriller, of feminist literature, and of depicting women's health issues. The story, which is at least partially inspired by Gilman's real life, features a woman suffering from depression and prescribed the "rest cure."

The story is presented as a journal. The main character and narrator is quickly dismissed by her husband, a doctor who laughs at her and does not believe she is truly sick. Her brother, also a physician, agrees. They forbid her from work and, though she disagrees, she follows their orders, asking, "What is one to do?" Despite her apparent compliance, however, she starts writing. Rather than think about her condition, which her husband says is the worst thing she can do, she focuses on the house and, specifically, the room to which she is confined. She strongly dislikes the wallpaper:

I never saw a worse paper in my life.
One of those sprawling flamboyant patterns committing every artistic sin.
It is dull enough to confuse the eye in following, pronounced enough to constantly irritate, and provoke study, and when you follow the lame, uncertain curves for a little distance, they suddenly commit suicide — plunge off at outrageous angles, destroy themselves in unheard-of contradictions.
The color is repellant, almost revolting; a smouldering, unclean yellow, strangely faded by the slow-turning sunlight.

The wallpaper soon becomes more than just an annoyance...

Many years later, Gilman committed suicide.