Charlotte Perkins Gilman's The Yellow Wall-Paper: A Sourcebook and Critical Edition

Penn State Series in the History of the Book

by Catherine J. Golden (Editor)

In 1892, Charlotte Perkins Gilman published her landmark work, The Yellow Wall-Paper , generating spirited debates in literary and political circles on both sides of the Atlantic. Today this story of a young wife and mother succumbing to madness is hailed both as a feminist classic and a key text in the American literary canon.
This sourcebook combines extracts from contemporary documents and critical reviews with incisive commentary, The volume also constitutes an important critical edition, reprinting the complete original text as published in the New England Magazine in 1892, with extensive commentary.

192 pages, Paperback

First published February 27, 1998

About the author

Catherine J. Golden is an English professor at Skidmore College.

Reviews

[Kaitlyn S. · Rating 4 out of 5]

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 · Rating 3 out of 5]

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 · Rating 3 out of 5]

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 · Rating 5 out of 5]

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 · Rating 4 out of 5]

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 · Rating 4 out of 5]

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

[Julia Hendrickson · Rating 4 out of 5]

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