Blog 71; Literary Excellence, an examination of Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wall-Paper.”

 I was reading a piece from Halle Butler last year in the Paris Review taken from an introduction to the Modern Library’s latest edition of Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s short fiction, and this led me on an examination of “The Yellow Wall-Paper” and in particular the uncanny way Gilman portrays an episode of mental illness in first person, with such clarity and directness. The confusion.  The horror. The content of the essay, like almost all material on Gilman and her writing, sadly ignores the real accomplishment of this, her best-known work.  The Paris Review essay tells us Gilman did not even consider what she wrote as literature, but I would heartily disagree with Gilman in the case of this short story.  I would go as far as to say that “The Yellow Wall-Paper” is one of the best fictional depictions of mental illness from the sufferer’s point of view, something on par with William Styron’s Darkness Visible. If any of my future writing that deals with mental conditions and altered states of consciousness comes close to Ms. Gilman’s achievement, I will count myself a lucky man.

The other aspect of Gilman’s work and life is that she was, to put it politely, a eugenicist.  In bolder terms, she was a bigot and racist of the worst sort, the proponent of all out genocide for the “inferior” members of our species.  This sad fact is disheartening, and a real blow to the gut.  Such a sensitive and creative soul harbored such hatred.  It is almost inconceivable.