Charlotte Perkins Gilman's "The Yellow Wall-Paper" and the History of Its Publication and Reception: A Critical Edition and Documentary Casebook

Penn State Series in the History of the Book

by Julie Bates Dock, Julie Bates Dock

Since its publication in 1892, Charlotte Perkins Gilman's "The Yellow Wall-paper" has always been recognized as a powerful statement about the victimization of a woman whose neurasthenic condition is completely misdiagnosed, mistreated, and misunderstood, leaving her to face insanity alone, as a prisoner in her own bedroom. Never before, however, has the story itself been portrayed as victimized.

In this first critical edition of Gilman's "The Yellow Wall-paper," accompanied by contemporary reviews and previously unpublished letters, Julie Bates Dock examines the various myth-frames that have been used to legitimize Gilman's story. The editor discusses how modern feminist critics' readings (and misreadings) of the available documents uphold a set of legends that originated with Gilman herself and that promulgate an almost saintly view of the pioneering feminist author. The documents made available in the collection enable scholars and students to evaluate firsthand Gilman's claims regarding the story's impact on its first audiences.

Dock presents an authoritative text of "The Yellow Wall-paper" for the first time since its initial publication. Included are a textual commentary, full descriptions of all relevant texts, lists of editorial emendations and pre-copy-text substantive variants, a complete historical collation that documents all the variants found in important editions after 1892, and a listing of textual sources for more than one hundred reprintings of the story in anthologies and textbooks.

Other documents in the casebook that illuminate the story's publication and reception histories include Gilman's successive and varying accounts of the story's history, her diary and manuscript log entries and letters pertaining to the story, W. D. Howells's correspondence with Gilman and Horace Scudder, editor of The Atlantic Monthly, and his remarks on the story when he reprinted it in Great American Short Stories, and more than two dozen reviews of the story by Gilman's contemporaries.

Taken together, the criticism, text, documents, and annotations constitute a rich and valuable contribution to Gilman scholarship, calling into question the feminist literary criticism that has helped to shape interpretations of a literary masterpiece.

144 pages

First published February 27, 1998

Reviews

[Kaitlyn S.]

This is absolutely my favorite version of Gilman's well-known short story, "The Yellow Wall-Paper." While, okay, not many people beyond literary academics are going to be interested in the differences between Julie Dock's "authoritative text," as the back cover reads, it also contains her exhaustive research into the history of the piece, and the various twists and turns the piece's framework has undergone from its initial and allegedly scandalous publication to its revival in the 60s (which isn't as clear-cut as it seems like it should be.)

I'd read the short story in a basic literature course which didn't stray much beyond the standard understanding of the text as a feminist outcry against the tyrannical expectations of housewifery, but I gotta say Gilman's personal vendetta with her psychiatrist was way more interesting.

This book includes snippets of Gilman's diary, manuscript log entries, and correspondence, as well as contemporaneous reviews of the work.

[Suzanne]

Read back in college. Wrote a paper on how the pattern in the wallpaper was trapping her sanity while she was trying to escape postpartum depression.
TA told me that wasn't the case. I still received an "A" for my "creative interpretation".
Upon this re-read I still agree with my initial hypothesis.
TA probably stole my idea for his thesis. 🤣😂🤷‍♀️

[Sigo Paolini]

Dock is only concerned with the public response and acceptance of the original short, which is included in what I imagine was her dissertation. She covers a very narrow view and gives a lot of her opinions on how the short should be read and interpreted, with little to none outside referencing for support. I was surprised, and why I got the book out of the library was biographical data on CPG that prompted the story. Dock did not even further a guess and only gave "weather reports" of Los Angeles for inspiration. In the back, where there is "textual criticism," she isn't joking about text — here she resigns herself to discussing dots and dashes and comments about CPG's grammar. There is also an entire section on the editorial emendations made to the text and its publication history. Finally, there is a section on the Documents of the Case where she tells us, as I suspected, that CPG was institutionalized in a sanitarium during her first marriage, but it is hard to know when that was. On the bright side, Dock gives a lot of photos and a full bibliography of other articles relating to the text and its effect on the feminist movement, but again nothing biographical.

[David]

The definitive edition of the most important American short story of the nineteenth century. If you read "The Yellow Wall-paper" in school (or elsewhere) the version that you read was probably mangled in important ways. Dditor Julie Bates Dock provides an authoritative text for the story and also investigates (annihilates?) commonly held truisms about the story and its history. Required reading for anyone intersted in American literature.

[iam]

One of my favorite stories, I truly enjoyed reading this "Critical Edition & Documentary Casebook." It put into context a fevered melancholy dream of a book that I had responded to on an emotional level upon my first reading of it as a teenager.

My mother saw a BBC adaptation of this story late one night on PBS. The next morning she informed me that she thought I would LOVE the book. My mother knows me well...

[D. Travers]

Everything you need to know about one of the most-analyzed stories in American literature...

[Julia Hendrickson]

A ton of useful historical contextual material, as well as the short story published as it looked originally in 1892.