Product Description
This reproduction was printed from a digital file created at the Library of Congress as part of an extensive scanning effort started with a generous donation from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.The Library is pleased to offer much of its public domain holdings free of charge online and at a modest price in this printed format.Seeing these older volumes from our collections rediscovered by new generations of readers renews our own passion for books and scholarship. ... Read more

Product Description
This reproduction was printed from a digital file created at the Library of Congress as part of an extensive scanning effort started with a generous donation from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.The Library is pleased to offer much of its public domain holdings free of charge online and at a modest price in this printed format.Seeing these older volumes from our collections rediscovered by new generations of readers renews our own passion for books and scholarship. ... Read more

Product Description
This reproduction was printed from a digital file created at the Library of Congress as part of an extensive scanning effort started with a generous donation from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.The Library is pleased to offer much of its public domain holdings free of charge online and at a modest price in this printed format.Seeing these older volumes from our collections rediscovered by new generations of readers renews our own passion for books and scholarship. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (2)

Depends on Why You're Reading It
I debated how many stars to give The Crux because there are two different ways of looking at it.On the one hand, this is (as the previous reviewer noted) an interesting text when viewed as part of women's history.Gilman is becoming increasingly canonized-- she was a complex and fascinating figure, and The Crux is an important part of studying her in particular and early feminism in general.

That said, I thought the book's entertainment value was slim.It is melodramatic, saccharine, and often boring.Granted, Gilman was intentionally tapping into generic conventions that were associated with women's fiction, and many of these problems result from that, but nevertheless, if you're looking for a consistently fun read, you may not find it here.

This is, though, a well-done edition of the book, and the introduction should prove interesting and useful to students and casual readers alike.

Essential, entertaining reading for Gilman fans
The Crux is essential reading for anyone seriously interested in the writings of Charlotte Perkins Gilman, and Jennifer S. Tuttle's is to be commended for bringing it to readers in this excellent edition. After having read most of Gilman's other fiction, I will admit that I put off reading this one because of its reputation as "the book about venereal disease" (sexually transmitted diseases).I feared it would be didactic, heavy handed, and depressing. Instead, it's like the best of Gilman's "optimistic reform" books: it treats its serious subject with a light touch, conveying its important ideas through appealing characters and a strong plot with Gilman's typical "happy ending."(Some readers might argue that the ending is a bit implausible, but that's part of the interest of this set of Gilman's writings.)At times, it is laugh-out-loud funny.Also, it's not entirely accurate to say that the book is "about" venereal disease, for although the last third of the book discusses the dangers women faced from sexually transmitted diseases in the years before adequate cures had been discovered, there is much more to the story.It portrays the opportunities for self discovery open to women who move from the stultifying conditions of New England villages to the open life in a new city in the Colorado mountains.The women characters (on whom the story focuses) range from young unmarried women to a seemingly dried-up old maid, a woman doctor, and one of literature's most delightful grandmothers.

My only serious objection to this edition is that University of Delaware Press, for some unaccountable reason, has elected to publish this book only in an expensive hardback edition.The story, along with Tuttle's illuminating introduction and clear explanatory notes, would be highly suitable as a teaching text if the book were available in a reasonably-priced paper edition. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

Great Research Book For Term Papers
This book shows how Gilman was truly thinking during her times of her youth to her death. She speaks in her own words which makes it great for researching for term papers. I used this book last Fall to research a paper I was doing for Art of Literature class at College.It helped me trememdously and I think it will help others who read it to learn or read it to do research of her life in a paper for school. It is definitley an A+ in my book of books on Gilman's life. ... Read more

Product Description
This digital document, covering the life and work of Charlotte (Anna) Perkins (Stetson) Gilman, is an entry from Contemporary Authors, a reference volume published by Thompson Gale. The length of the entry is 2940 words. The page length listed above is based on a typical 300-word page. Although the exact content of each entry from this volume can vary, typical entries include the following information:

• Place and date of birth and death (if deceased)
• Family members
• Education
• Professional associations and honors
• Employment
• Writings, including books and periodicals
• A description of the author's work
• References to further readings about the author

Product Description
The Charlotte Perkins Gilman Reader is an anthology of fiction by one of America's most important feminist writers. Probably best known as the author of "The Yellow Wallpaper," in which a woman is driven mad by chauvinist psychiatry, Gilman wrote numerous other short stories and novels reflecting her radical socialist and feminist view of turn-of-the-century America. Collected here by the noted Gilman scholar Ann J. Lane are eighteen stories and fragments, including a selection from Herland, Gilman's novel of a feminist utopia. The resulting anthology provides a provocative blueprint to Gilman's intellectual and creative production. ... Read more

Product Description

    Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1869-1935) was one of the leading intellectuals of the American women's movement in the first two decades of the twentieth century.  Moving beyond the struggle for suffrage, Gilman confronted an even larger problem—economic and social discrimination against women.  Her book, Women and Economics, published in 1898, was repeatedly printed and translated into seven languages.  She was a tireless traveler, lecturer, and writer and is perhaps best known for her dramatic short story, "The Yellow Wallpaper."  Gilman's autobiography gives us access to the life of a remarkable and courageous woman.
    Originally published in 1935, soon after Gilman's death, The Living of Charlotte Perkins Gilman has been out of print for several years.  This edition includes a new introduction by Gilman's noted biographer, Anne J. Lane.

Customer Reviews (1)

Great Book to see How She Truly lived her life
Gilman was a woman who went through much pain and suffering this book tells of her life being taken away from her by her Psychiatrist whom she hated for the rest of her. She speaks of being put on the Rest Cure for Post-Pardom Depression and how the doctors told her not to have anymore children. She speaks of her 8 years being locked up in her own house and in an insane asylum and she tells how her doctor put her on a regamine for the rest of her life.She also speaks of how she was not able to write and generate what she loved most--writing; because her doctor told her not too. She speaks of her publication of her first short stories and "The Yellow Wallpaper" and many others of her stories. She also or the author also speaks of how Gilman commits suicide in the end. It gets really depressing, but you really see how Psychologists thought in the 19th century and how a great writer had to live her life. ... Read more

Product Description

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, providing:

• an introduction to the political, biographical and medical contexts in which Gilman was writing
• a publishing and critical history of the work with extracts from the earliest reviews through to recent criticism
• a chronology of key biographical and contextual events
• an annotated guide to further reading
• original illustrations and photographs of the author and figures related to the story.

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.

Customer Reviews (2)

A Review by Dr. Joseph Suglia
In 1887, Charlotte Perkins Gilman was committed to a sanitarium in Pennsylvania run by one Dr. S. Weir Mitchell, the popularizer of a cure for female hysteria. Every female hysteric, according to Mitchell, should be placed under the watchful supervision of a (male) physician. He must oversee the strict regimentation of her body's habits. Such vigilant monitoring is a conditio sine qua non for any physician who wishes to cure the patient of her malady. She must submit unquestioningly to the physician's will and obey all of his prescriptions-one of which, invariably, is the injunction to do nothing. Bed rest is compulsory and should be vigorously enforced. The patient is to be placed in a state of perpetual invalidism; all forms of activity to which she is accustomed must be invalidated. Above all, she must not write.

Five years later, Gilman published the novella, The Yellow Wallpaper, a slightly veiled polemic against Weir Mitchell (the physician is even mentioned explicitly in the text) and the "cure" to female depression and hysteria that he advocated. The narrative is written from the perspective of a woman who undergoes a nervous breakdown. What we are reading is her diary, which charts her gradual mental deterioration. The narrator and her husband/physician, John, have rented an ancestral house for a summer. John prescribes for the narrator a "rest cure" that is clearly indebted to the teachings of Weir Mitchell. She is prohibited from writing; she writes nonetheless, perhaps to spite him. Isolated in her room and completely inactive except for her writing, the narrator becomes transfixed by the sickeningly grotesque wallpaper that surrounds her. She projects her self into the convoluted patterns of the paper and imagines a feminine figure-not necessarily a "woman," but rather a "shape... like a woman" [39]-entangled in the radiating network of fronds and vines. The feminine shape escapes from the wallpaper's intricate web and is seen "creeping up and down" in the "dark grape arbors" [45] of the courtyard. In the final scene of the work, the narrator, who has seemingly lost her mind, tears off the wallpaper and crawls and "creeps" "smoothly" [50] across the floor and over John, who has collapsed lifelessly after seeing his wife wriggling and writhing on the ground. Since all of this is composed in the present tense, apparently she is writing as she is creeping.

Two orders of writing are figured in the novella. On the one hand, there is the language of the yellow wallpaper, which spreads its sprawling patterns, its fecundating, fungoid forms, all over the room in which the narrator is confined-this is clearly representative of the language of medicine and maleness. On the other hand, there is the ideolect of the female narrator, who frees herself by writing in defiance of her husband's orders. Writing is here figured as a mode of activity-which, for Mitchell, is a quintessentially male practice (women who are active, according to Mitchell, ape men).

Little known in the century in which it was written, The Yellow Wallpaper was rediscovered in the late twentieth century and has become what is easily one of the most "over-interpreted" works of fiction in the last few decades. Most interpreters have pointed to the novella as a figuration of female liberation in modernist fiction. Despite its seeming simplicity, they invariably point to the text's so-called "ambiguities" and "contradictions," the most glaring of which is the manner in which the novella ends; most seem to believe that the novella ends complicatedly and equivocally. Does the narrator, in fact, achieve liberation? Or does she not? John, it is often said, faints to the floor, and fainting, as everyone knows, is somehow "feminine." Therefore, the narrator has perhaps achieved a "victory" over John. (One should also call attention to the fact that John is referred to, in the final scene, as "that man" [50], his proper name having been replaced by a demonstrative pronoun and a common noun.) And yet the narrator is also reduced, at the close of the novella, to the status of a worm or a snake, crawling and creeping across the floor along a self-ordained path. She certainly seems to have "precipitated" into what is usually described as "madness"-a "madness" that is attributed not to her "imaginative power and habit of story-making" [34], but rather to her husband's profession. Her progressive "improve[-ment]" [43] has resulted in a regressive deterioration. Because of this central ambiguity between "positive" and "negative" meanings, the novella seems, at once, a celebratory and affirmative "portrayal" of female liberation from a constraining, male-dominated order and an elegiac, despairing cri de coeur that proclaims the seeming impossibility of liberation from tyrannical maleness.

The notion that this is an interesting "ambiguity" or "contradiction" escapes this reader. Far richer literary works of art were produced during the same period in which The Yellow Wallpaper was written. Virginia Woolf, Gertrude Stein, and Djuana Barnes are only a few examples of female writers whose work is far more provocative and complex than that of Charlotte Perkins Gilman. No one with a shred of rationality would deny that The Yellow Wallpaper has a didactic character; and, with the exception of a few trite "ambiguities," its meanings are almost completely self-explanatory. The simplicity of the work may explain the multiplication of critical discourses that it has generated.

Dr. Joseph Suglia

Perfect for research
If you are doing research on "The Yellow Wall-Paper" this book is essential. It provides a great amount of context for the piece as well as lots of criticism and interpretation. Of the 20 or so books that I used for research, this was by far the best one. Well worth the investment. ... Read more

Product Description
A new collection of fiction and poetry from a major voice in American feminism and literature

Charlotte Perkins Gilman was a turn-of-the-century American feminist and socialist thinker. In her works of fiction, Gilman sought to illustrate her ideas about the way American society squandered the talents and economic contributions of women. Based on the nervous breakdown she suffered during her own disastrous first marriage, The Yellow Wall-Paper is her classic story about a woman who goes mad when the rest-cure treatment she undergoes forbids her any kind of work.

Herland, Gilman's most famous novel, is a feminist utopian comedy in which three men stumble upon a society of women that has banished men. Also included in this Penguin Twentieth-Century Classics edition is a selection of Gilman's poetry and other short fiction. Gilman scholar Denise D. Knight has written an enlightening Introduction that explores Gilman's use of the utopian form, satire, and fantasy to provide a critique of women's place in society and to propose creative solutions. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (5)

Moderately entertaining
The most amazing thing about these stories is the extreme feminism displayed for the years that they were written.But for modern audiences, it's a bit over-the-top yet uninteresting.The stories were moderately interesting and moderately thought-provoking.It's a classic that doesn't translate well into our present.

A Review by Dr. Joseph Suglia
In 1887, Charlotte Perkins Gilman was committed to a sanitarium in Pennsylvania run by one Dr. S. Weir Mitchell, the popularizer of a cure for female hysteria. Every female hysteric, according to Mitchell, should be placed under the watchful supervision of a (male) physician. He must oversee the strict regimentation of her body's habits. Such vigilant monitoring is a conditio sine qua non for any physician who wishes to cure the patient of her malady. She must submit unquestioningly to the physician's will and obey all of his prescriptions-one of which, invariably, is the injunction to do nothing. Bed rest is compulsory and should be vigorously enforced. The patient is to be placed in a state of perpetual invalidism; all forms of activity to which she is accustomed must be invalidated. Above all, she must not write.

Five years later, Gilman published the novella, The Yellow Wallpaper, a slightly veiled polemic against Weir Mitchell (the physician is even mentioned explicitly in the text) and the "cure" to female depression and hysteria that he advocated. The narrative is written from the perspective of a woman who undergoes a nervous breakdown. What we are reading is her diary, which charts her gradual mental deterioration. The narrator and her husband/physician, John, have rented an ancestral house for a summer. John prescribes for the narrator a "rest cure" that is clearly indebted to the teachings of Weir Mitchell. She is prohibited from writing; she writes nonetheless, perhaps to spite him. Isolated in her room and completely inactive except for her writing, the narrator becomes transfixed by the sickeningly grotesque wallpaper that surrounds her. She projects her self into the convoluted patterns of the paper and imagines a feminine figure-not necessarily a "woman," but rather a "shape... like a woman" [39]-entangled in the radiating network of fronds and vines. The feminine shape escapes from the wallpaper's intricate web and is seen "creeping up and down" in the "dark grape arbors" [45] of the courtyard. In the final scene of the work, the narrator, who has seemingly lost her mind, tears off the wallpaper and crawls and "creeps" "smoothly" [50] across the floor and over John, who has collapsed lifelessly after seeing his wife wriggling and writhing on the ground. Since all of this is composed in the present tense, apparently she is writing as she is creeping.

Two orders of writing are figured in the novella. On the one hand, there is the language of the yellow wallpaper, which spreads its sprawling patterns, its fecundating, fungoid forms, all over the room in which the narrator is confined-this is clearly representative of the language of medicine and maleness. On the other hand, there is the ideolect of the female narrator, who frees herself by writing in defiance of her husband's orders. Writing is here figured as a mode of activity-which, for Mitchell, is a quintessentially male practice (women who are active, according to Mitchell, ape men).

Little known in the century in which it was written, The Yellow Wallpaper was rediscovered in the late twentieth century and has become what is easily one of the most "over-interpreted" works of fiction in the last few decades. Most interpreters have pointed to the novella as a figuration of female liberation in modernist fiction. Despite its seeming simplicity, they invariably point to the text's so-called "ambiguities" and "contradictions," the most glaring of which is the manner in which the novella ends; most seem to believe that the novella ends complicatedly and equivocally. Does the narrator, in fact, achieve liberation? Or does she not? John, it is often said, faints to the floor, and fainting, as everyone knows, is somehow "feminine." Therefore, the narrator has perhaps achieved a "victory" over John. (One should also call attention to the fact that John is referred to, in the final scene, as "that man" [50], his proper name having been replaced by a demonstrative pronoun and a common noun.) And yet the narrator is also reduced, at the close of the novella, to the status of a worm or a snake, crawling and creeping across the floor along a self-ordained path. She certainly seems to have "precipitated" into what is usually described as "madness"-a "madness" that is attributed not to her "imaginative power and habit of story-making" [34], but rather to her husband's profession. Her progressive "improve[-ment]" [43] has resulted in a regressive deterioration. Because of this central ambiguity between "positive" and "negative" meanings, the novella seems, at once, a celebratory and affirmative "portrayal" of female liberation from a constraining, male-dominated order and an elegiac, despairing cri de coeur that proclaims the seeming impossibility of liberation from tyrannical maleness.

The notion that this is an interesting "ambiguity" or "contradiction" escapes this reader. Far richer literary works of art were produced during the same period in which The Yellow Wallpaper was written. Virginia Woolf, Gertrude Stein, and Djuana Barnes are only a few examples of female writers whose work is far more provocative and complex than that of Charlotte Perkins Gilman. No one with a shred of rationality would deny that The Yellow Wallpaper has a didactic character; and, with the exception of a few trite "ambiguities," its meanings are almost completely self-explanatory. The simplicity of the work may explain the multiplication of critical discourses that it has generated.

Dr. Joseph Suglia

Yellow Wall-paper
I bought this book for a class in college and enjoyed all of the readings we did for the class.If you are interested in fictional feminism writing then this is the book for you!

Enjoyable Read
Herland is one of my favorite stories.If you enjoy feminist publications this is one to read.It sometimes makes me laugh and other times makes you really think about how American Society works.

A nice little afternoon read....
A generally overlooked gem of a utopian novella that makes for a pleasant experience.The treatment is calmer and more down to earth than A Brave New World, and is more thoughtful and meditative than Looking Backward.Gilman's feminism celebrates motherhood above all, and embraces Christianity.In a time when we're reconsidering gender roles and marriage in society, Herland is particularly relevant and insightful.

Highly recommended for the fan of utopian literature and early feminist thought. ... Read more

Product Description
In Wild Unrest, Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz offers a vivid portrait of Charlotte Perkins Gilman in the 1880s, drawing new connections between the author's life and work and illuminating the predicament of women then and now.
"The Yellow Wall-Paper" captured a woman's harrowing descent into madness and drew on the author's intimate knowledge of mental illness. Like the narrator of her story, Gilman was a victim of what was termed "neurasthenia" or "hysteria"--a "bad case of the nerves." She had faced depressive episodes since adolescence, and with the arrival of marriage and motherhood, they deepened. In 1887 she suffered a severe breakdown and sought the "rest cure" of famed neurologist S. Weir Mitchell. Her marriage was a troubled one, and in the years that followed she separated from and ultimately divorced her husband. It was at this point, however, that Gilman embarked on what would become an influential career as an author, lecturer, and advocate for women's rights.
Horowitz draws on a treasure trove of primary sources to illuminate the making of "The Yellow Wall-Paper": Gilman's journals and letters, which closely track her daily life and the reading that most influenced her; the voluminous diaries of her husband, Walter Stetson, which contain verbatim transcriptions of conversations with and letters from Charlotte; and the published work of S. Weir Mitchell, whose rest cure dominated the treatment of female "hysteria" in late 19th century America. Horowitz argues that these sources ultimately reveal that Gilman's great story emerged more from emotions rooted in the confinement and tensions of her unhappy marriage than from distress following Mitchell's rest cure.
Wild Unrest adds immeasurably to our understanding of Charlotte Perkins Gilman, uncovering both the literary and personal sources behind "The Yellow Wall-Paper." ... Read more