Review 27: The Yellow Wallpaper and Other Stories by Charlotte Perkins Gilman

In the course of this 100 Books shebang, I’m trying to read some classics that I’ve woefully missed educating myself upon, as well as literature’s newer babies. To this end, The Yellow Wallpaper and other stories nudged its way into my open hands.

With pieces originally published between 1892 and 1914, this slim but solid volume of Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s stories is an enjoyable representation of the themes for which she’s famous. This is essentially an exposition of the harm that gender-based roles do to both sexes, across a series of bite-sized narratives.

While they’re all thematically-linked, Gilman’s writing style shifts across the book, from the whimsy of Three Thanksgivings to the first-person horror of the book’s famous titular story, The Yellow Wallpaper. This gives the book a nice sense of balance, and helps deliver her messages more effectively.

Many of the stories seem to be written as a form of wish fulfilment. They feature female protagonists who find ways around the systems that have been pushed upon them. There’s the woman who puts herself into men’s shoes, freeing herself from societal constraints and ridiculous hats; the woman who sets up a Women’s Club to buy her house and save herself from an unwanted marriage; the woman who walks out on her cheating husband, taking the servant he seduced with her. There’s a real sense of wanting to provide a blueprint for women who were willing and able to step out from under the one they’d had foisted upon them.

It also makes the point that nobody benefits from patriarchy. Men either suffer from their own enforcement of gender roles, or are relieved from them. Gilman was a Utopian feminist, so it wasn’t really in her interests to show the negatives of patriarchy alone – she had to provide alternatives too, and she does that very neatly here.

There is a current trend towards writing stories that are ‘moments in time’ rather than actual full stories. While these undoubtedly take a lot of skill to write, they are also as satisfying as a burger made from MDF and tears. Gilman’s stories, happily, are funny, neatly structured short stories of the type I like – proper actual stories with beginnings, middles and ends. If you like these too, I recommend picking them up.

--

This is my twenty-seventh book review of 100 to raise money for Refuge, the domestic abuse charity. If you liked this review, or just want to help out, please donate on the link below!

Comments

Review 34: The Long Song by Andrea Levy

I’ve read a few books dealing with black slavery as part of this challenge. It’s interesting how each one looks at it through a slightly different lens, adding slightly different perspectives to the whole picture. In The Long Song , the thing that rings as much through the book as the horror and inhumanity of slavery is the sense of humour between the slaves themselves. It felt odd to laugh out loud while reading this, but there are plenty of times I did. I guess that this in itself is important – humour is an essential and universal human trait, so if we deny the slaves’ humour in recounting their stories, maybe it’s another way of denying their humanity all over again. I tried rewriting this about five times to make me sound less like a pseudo-intellectual jerksack, but this is the best I could do, I’m afraid. Anyway, TLS is set in a Jamaican sugar plantation in the early 19th century, and spans the periods just before and after slavery was abolished in the British Empir...

Review 5: Gulp - Adventures on the Alimentary Canal by Mary Roach

When it comes to the works of Mary Roach, this ain’t my first Roach-eo - I’ve previously read and been entranced by Stiff , her foray into the world of corpses. But I still wasn’t expecting to like this book quite so much as I did. It’s one of the most enjoyable reads I’ve had for a long time. Gulp is a hotchpotch journey down the alimentary canal - the big vacuum cleaner bag that runs from our mouths to our exit wounds. Roach isn’t writing a medical textbook here though. She follows the stories of things that sound interesting, or gross, or (regularly) both, so you end up with quite a lot of stuff that’s tangentially-related rather than a tube-by-tube account of your inner passages. And that’s all for the betterment of the book. Here are a few facts and amusing asides I noted down during reading: Fabric softener works by slightly digesting the fibres of your clothes, using the same enzymes as in your guts. Painting restoration workers often spit on swabs to take layers...

Review 8: Eileen by Ottessa Moshfegh

I sincerely believed that if there were less of me, I would have fewer problems. This pretty much sums up Ottessa Moshfegh’s Eileen . The titular protagonist is a sort of anti-heroine, but without the swagger that word tends to conjure. Instead, she has been raised in a loveless home, and has never had friends. She hates her town, her family and most of all, herself. Her misanthropy springs from the world’s rejection of her, rather than the other way around. Moshfegh says that she wrote Eileen as an experiment, following a paint-by-numbers guide to commercial fiction. But the Man Booker shortlisted novel comes out as anything but conventional. It’s more a masterclass in characterisation – light on plot, but heavy on unreliable narration, building Eileen’s miserable day-to-day existence up until the character slouches fully off the page. It’s a really sad and well-observed depiction of how women can internalise hatred. Eileen is disgusted by her own body. She refuses to w...

The 100 Book Year

Search This Blog