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.

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