Wild Unrest: Charlotte Perkins Gilman and the Making of "The Yellow Wall-Paper"

Reformer and author Charlotte Perkins Gilman, who in 1890 wrote the hair-raising, semiautobiographical, and now iconic short story "The Yellow Wall-Paper," documenting an isolated wife's descent from nervous illness into madness, was intimate with her subject. In 1887, when she had a nervous breakdown, Perkins Gilman sought the rest cure of famed neurologist S. Weir Mitchell, and later, she claimed she wrote "The Yellow Wall-Paper" in protest against Mitchell and his methods, which limited women's intellectual activities (though, Horowitz says, probably not as much as the story indicated). But Smith College historian Horowitz, drawing on the personal writings of Perkins Gilman and her first husband, artist Charles Walter Stetson, and Mitchell's abundant papers, concludes that the story was a cri de coeur against Stetson and the traditional marriage he had demanded. Perkins Gilman accused Mitchell, according to Horowitz, primarily to protect her daughter, Katharine, and also her dear friend Grace Channing, who married Stetson after his divorce from Perkins Gilman, and raised Katharine. This convincing, absorbing, and perceptive book should find a general readership as well as an important place with women's studies and psychology students. 20 b&w illus. (Nov.)