“The Yellow Wallpaper” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman is a feminist classic, a haunting critique of the isolation treatment for female hysteria wrapped up in a superb psychological horror story. Over a century later women are still battling gender bias in the treatment of mental illness. Here are 15 stories of very different women who have in common the fact that they are fighting for control of their worlds and of their minds. Traci Orsi's "Waiting for Jordan" finds Julia hallucinating at home when her husband is shipped off to Iraq. Leah Chaffin's "Last Caress" delves into the sad and savage story of a rare female serial killer while in "An Obedient Girl" Amy Bridges relates her experience as an average girl who has a singular experience with a lobotomized woman. Age, religion, motherhood, sex and work life are all explored in these gripping stories of women who remain Behind the Yellow Wallpaper, battling valiantly and sometimes viciously to break free by any means necessary. Each story is paired with original photographic art by Loreal Prystaj. Prystaj’s dark, gripping art evoke the same despair, fear, anger, hopelessness, heartache, and fight for survival that make up these extraordinary New Tales of Madness.

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. Filled with extensive commentary, as well as contextual and critical materials, this reprint of the complete original text--as published in the New England Magazine in 1892--constitutes an important critical edition.

It is very seldom that mere ordinary people like John and myself secure ancestral halls for the summer. A colonial mansion, a hereditary estate, I would say a haunted house, and reach the height of romantic felicity—but that would be asking too much of fate! Still I will proudly declare that there is something queer about it. Else, why should it be let so cheaply? And why have stood so long untenanted? John laughs at me, of course, but one expects that in marriage.

Follow the narrator on her subsequent decent into madness is this story originally written by Charlotte Perkins Gilman. Both the original tale and a retelling by author, Nicki Snyder, are contained within this book. In 1892, the narrator, having just given birth, is taken to the countryside to rest and recuperate. Her husband, who is also her physician, prescribes her The Rest Cure method, designed to cure her "nervous condition". The large house, fresh air, and sprawling gardens are meant to relax her mind and body. However, the treatment calls for isolation, bed rest, and boredom. This catalyst leads the narrator down a path where reality and fantasy merge together in a very unhealthy way.

Unlock the more straightforward side of The Yellow Wallpaper with this concise and insightful summary and analysis! This engaging summary presents an analysis of The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, a haunting short story about a woman suffering from post-partum depression, whose doctor husband prescribes her a ‘rest cure’: she is to remain in the same room at the top of the house, to see no one, and to refrain from all reading, writing and thinking. However, as time goes by, with nothing to occupy her other than staring at the room’s ugly yellow wallpaper, the narrator starts to see a woman trapped within its endless pattern, and begins to wonder how she could set the woman in the wallpaper free... The Yellow Wallpaper was inspired by Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s own experiences of post-partum depression, and has come to be regarded as a classic of feminist literature. Find out everything you need to know about The Yellow Wallpaper in a fraction of the time! This in-depth and informative reading guide brings you: • A complete plot summary • Character studies • Key themes and symbols • Questions for further reflection Why choose BrightSummaries.com? Available in print and digital format, our publications are designed to accompany you on your reading journey. The clear and concise style makes for easy understanding, providing the perfect opportunity to improve your literary knowledge in no time. See the very best of literature in a whole new light with BrightSummaries.com!

Edited with a new introduction by Aimee McLaughlin "The Yellow Wallpaper" by American writer Charlotte Perkins Gilman, first published in January 1892, is regarded as an important early work of American feminist literature for its illustration of the attitudes towards mental and physical health of women in the 19th century. What happens when a woman is pushed too far? Is she able to express her thoughts and feelings, or is she forced towards the expectation of behaving 'normally' again soon? A woman travels with her husband to an old colonial mansion after a nervous breakdown triggered by the birth of their child. Confined to the nursery and allowed only to breathe fresh air, eat well and rest in line with a regimented 'cure', she slowly begins to unravel at the seams. Her only distraction is writing in secret – that, and the woman she begins to see trapped inside the yellow wallpaper of the room itself. Isolated and breaking apart, she sets herself a task: to free the woman, and to become one with her temporary confinement. Charlotte Perkins-Gilman's 'The Yellow Wallpaper' presents a harrowing, disturbing account of mental stress, confinement and female turmoil - within which the only available solace can be found inside four peeling, sickly yellow walls ... Our new edition also features the sequence of poems "Woman" by Charlotte Perkins Gilman. "The gothic genre offers Gilman an effective mode of diagnosing contemporary culture whilst in tandem expressing her ensuing fears and anxieties. Gilman within this novella, gothicises the domestic setting, inverting the pillars of domesticity: family, security and understanding, in turn unveiling the dangers lurking behind the familiarity of gender roles within marital relations. The intimate first-person narration of the narrative serves to enhance Gilman's exposure of the oppressive forces of a male-dominated society, as she deplores her protagonist's inferior position in her domestic arrangement. The female narrator is encumbered by masculine superiority, undoubtedly dwelling in the middle of patriarchy. Embedded within her characterisation is the subjugated role bestowed upon Victorian women. Gilman projects derangement onto a familiar literary figure ― the middle−class wife and mother ― placing the source of this madness in the inviolate sphere for dutiful women ― the home." from the new introduction to The Yellow Wallpaper by Aimee McLaughlin

Known primarily for her classic and haunting story "The Yellow Wallpaper," Charlotte Perkins Gilman was an enormously influential American feminist and sociologist. Her early-twentieth-century writings continue to inspire writers and activists today. This collection includes selections from both her fiction and nonfiction work. In addition to the title story, there are seven short stories collected here that combine humor, anger, and startling vision to suggest how women's "place" in society should be changed to benefit all. The nonfiction selections are from Gilman's The Man-Made World: Our Androcentric Culture and her masterpiece, Women And Economics, which was translated into seven languages and established her international reputation as a theorist. Also included in a delightful excerpt from Gilman's utopian novel, Herland, an acidly funny tale about three American male explorers who stumble into an all-female society and begin their odyssey by insisting, "This is a civilized country . . . there must be men." Gilman's analyses of economic and women's issues are as incisive and relevant today as they were upon their original publication. This volume is an unprecedented opportunity to rediscover a powerful American writer.

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.

This book provides an overview of the hero journey theme in literature, from antiquity to the present, with a focus on the imagery of the rites of passage in human life (initiation at adolescence, mid-life, and death). This is the only book to focus on the major works of the literary tradition, detailing discussions of the hero journey in major literary texts. Included are chapters on the literature of Antiquity (Sumerian, Egyptian, Biblical, Greek, and Roman), the Middle Ages (with emphasis on the Arthurian Romance), the Renaissance to the Enlightenment (Shakespeare, Milton, Marvell, Pope, Fielding, the Arabian Nights, and Alchemical Illustration), Romanticism and Naturalism (Coleridge, Selected Grimm's Tales, Bront%, Bierce, Whitman, Twain, Hawthorne, E.T.A. Hoffman, Rabindranath Tagore), and Modernism to Contemporary (Joyce, Gilman, Alifa Rifaat, Bellow, Lessing, Pynchon, Eudora Welty).

The Yellow Wallpaper and Herland, written by prominent feminist author Charlotte Perkins Stetson Gilman, offers a thought-provoking and compelling exploration of gender roles, mental health, and societal expectations in the late 19th and early 20th century. Both texts, although written nearly a decade apart, share a common theme of challenging traditional gender norms and advocating for female empowerment. In The Yellow Wallpaper, Gilman tells the story of a woman's descent into madness as she is confined to a room with yellow wallpaper by her controlling husband, who is also her physician. Through the protagonist's increasingly erratic thoughts and behaviors, the author highlights the damaging effects of the oppressive patriarchal society on women's mental health. Gilman also critiques the medical profession's treatment of women, particularly highlighting the lack of agency and autonomy female patients were given in their own care. Herland, on the other hand, presents a utopian society where women live in isolation and have evolved to reproduce through parthenogenesis, rendering men unnecessary. The story follows three male explorers who stumble upon this all-female society and are forced to confront their own preconceived notions of gender roles and superiority. Through this fictional society, Gilman challenges traditional gender roles and suggests that women are capable of thriving without men, challenging the male-dominated societal structure of the time. Gilman's writing in both books is characterized by her strong feminist beliefs and her ability to use fiction to present thought-provoking social commentary. She challenges the idea of women's inherent inferiority and advocates for their rights to autonomy, education, and independence. Her writing also sheds light on the damaging effects of patriarchal norms and expectations on women's mental health, a topic that was often ignored or dismissed in her time. The Yellow Wallpaper and Herland remain relevant and powerful texts in today's society, shedding light on the ongoing struggle for gender equality and the importance of empowering women. They continue to inspire feminist discourse and serve as a reminder of the progress that still needs to be made in achieving true gender equality. Overall, this collection of books is a must-read for anyone interested in feminist literature and the societal implications of gender roles. In this collection of stories, Dostoevsky showcases his remarkable ability to delve into the depths of the human experience. Through his rich character development, unflinching social commentary, and nuanced exploration of themes such as love, isolation, and the inherent contradictions within humanity, the author masterfully captures the essence of what it means to be human. These seven short stories are a testament to Dostoevsky's timeless brilliance and continue to enthrall readers with their piercing insights into the human condition.