"The Atypical Style of Charlotte Perkins Gilman" Marty Brooks, 1998

Despite the fact that Charlotte Perkins Gilman produced a large body of fictional work (9 novels and nearly 200 short stories), "The Yellow Wall-Paper" is the only story by Gilman that has been consistently anthologized and that has received widespread critical attention. In part this is due to the story's theme, its presentation of the entrapment of middle-class marriage and the destructive limits of women's roles aligns this story with similarly themed works by late nineteenth and early twentieth-century writers such as Kate Chopin, Elizabeth Phelps, Edith Wharton, Mary Wilkes Freeman, and Ellen Glasgow. Therefore the text can be introduced as part of a feminist trend that characterized turn-of-the-century women's writing.

Another reason, however, that "The Yellow Wall-Paper" has received critical attention is its "advanced" style. In many ways "The Yellow Wall-Paper" anticipates a series of literary experiments with style that would be introduced ten years later in the modernist movement. With its emphasis on the confused and often contradictory thoughts of a first person narrator, the story anticipates the stream-of-consciousness writings and experiments with unreliable narrators that can be found in the later work of William Faulkner, James Joyce, Jean Toomer, and Virginia Woolf. With its series of richly symbolic imagery, it anticipates the structured symbolism of later works by the imagist poets and high modernists such as Wallace Stevens, T.S. Eliot, and Thomas Mann. And finally with its use of a journal format and its ambiguous ending, it reflects a self-conscious literary style and a rejection of didacticism that would come to define the modernist movement.

Ironically, the "advanced" aspects of "The Yellow Wall-Paper" that have made it popular are also aspects of the story that make it atypical of Gilman's style. When one looks at the larger body of Gilman's work what one discovers is a shift away from the type of confused first person narrator found in this story towards a confident all-knowing third person narrator. One discovers not stories that explore the complex psychological development of a character, but rather stories that feature stock characters who can be seen as a representative of a type or a class. One discovers stories that focus not on ambiguously symbolic images, but on the detailed description of daily routine and domestic life. And finally, one discovers stories that are self-consciously didactic with plots that are interrupted by lectures by both characters and the narrator on the political and social ramifications of events taking place in the story.

Such a style, although lacking the "sophistication" of "The Yellow Wall-Paper," reflects Gilman's own frequent declarations that she was not engaged in creating literature but in conveying to as widespread an audience as she could a set of ideas. The directness, easily recognizable characters, and use of a realism frequently found in contemporary magazine fiction made her "messages" about the nature of women's role in society more obvious and easily discernable for a general audience. In adopting this style, Gilman was also returning to a well-tested political format that she had seen work in the earlier writings by women. For one familiar with nineteenth-century literature, the combination of stock characters, didacticism, and domestic realism found in Gilman's later work calls forth the abolitonist novels that appeared in the popular press forty years before and the best-selling evangelical women's fiction (Susan Warner's The Wide Wide World, Maria Cummins' The Lamplighter) that were still popular in the 1870's and 1880's. Both genres were ones of which Gilman would have been acutely aware due to her own famous relative, Harriet Beecher Stowe whose Uncle Tom's Cabin had created a sensation and had a major impact on the abolitionist movement.

Because of this shift in style, Gilman's later and more "typical" work can be seen as simplistic, lacking the layers and experimentation with language and subtle meanings that a modern (and post-modern) audience has come to expect as an audience. Recently though critics such as Sheryle Meyer, Anne Lane, and Carol Kessler have suggested that one needs different critical standards to look at Gilman's later work, that one should look at these texts as engaged in "cultural work." Basically, this means that the texts should be judged rhetorically as persuasive attempts to engage a specific audience and change the ideas of a given time. Whether one accepts this rhetorical approach or not, what is clear is that if one wishes to have a full sense of Gilman as a writer, one needs to read her later work--the work that typlified her lifelong attempt to examine women's roles through the medium of fiction. Two places one might start to gain this complete picture are Denise Knight's The Yellow Wall-Paper" and Selected Stories of Charlotte Perkins Gilman ( Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1994) and Carol Farley Kessler's Charlotte Perkins Gilman: Her Progress Toward Utopia with Selected Writings (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press,1995).