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 7: Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi

The first thing you see when you open Yaa Gyasi’s Homegoing is six pages of quotes from reviews saying how good it is. If you’re like me (and with any luck you’re not), you’ll think: talk about putting yourself under pressure . Happily, Gyasi more than rises to the implicit challenge set by her voluminous praise. The scope of her book - following two branches of an African family tree as they become separated by time and distance – is beautifully realised, with each chapter representing another generational step down. Homegoing is, in its clearest sense, about the reverberating impact of slavery on black people, both in the lands they were ripped from and the lands they were taken to. But the core theme that ties the book together is connection between those two strands of people. The title could be considered a reference to ‘returning’ to Africa, but I think it’s more powerful when considered as more abstract – the re-binding of the strands of people who have been separa...

Review 9: The Portable Veblen by Elizabeth McKenzie

The Portable Veblen is an odd read, and possibly not in the ways you’d expect. Picking it up, I assumed it was some sort of sci-fi or magic realist novel. Was a Veblen some sort of futuristic gun? A translation device? A highly treatable but somewhat embarrassing rash? In fact, as with so much in this world, it really only serves to highlight my troglodyte-level ignorance. Apparently Veblen is a reference to Thorstein Veblen, a Norwegian socialist and sociologist living in America in the late 1800s. He essentially decried capitalism and proposed an alternative system to Marxism, and it is after this prominent thinker that TPV ’s main character, Veblen, is named. For me, the novel is really about contradictions between people and between families as they try to adjust from being purely individual to being part of a wider group. How do you decide what to compromise on and what to retain? What is an unhealthy hangover from your upbringing and what is a genuinely core part of ...

The 100 Book Year

Search This Blog