Charlotte Perkins Gilman's “The Yellow Wall-paper” and the History of Its Publication and Reception: A Critical Edition and Documentary Casebook

Published by Penn State University Press 1998

Charlotte Perkins Gilman's “The Yellow Wall-paper” and the History of Its Publication and Reception

A Critical Edition and Documentary Casebook

Edited by: Julie Bates Dock

In the series Penn State Series in the History of the Book

https://doi.org/10.1515/9780271074122

Overview
Contents

About this book

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In this first critical edition of Gilman's "The Yellow Wall-paper," accompanied by contemporary reviews and previously unpublished letters, Julie Bates Dock examines the various myth-frames that have been used to legitimize Gilman's story.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.

Author / Editor information

Dock Julie Bates :

Julie Bates Dock is an independent scholar living in Torrance, California. She is the author of The Press of Ideas: Readings for Writers on Print Culture and the Information Age (1996).

Reviews

“Dock’s casebook will teach readers several lessons about how much we should credit an author’s own account of the fate of a piece of writing. It is a fascinating study of the ways in which literature and political concerns can become intertwined, and how a faulty text and inept bibliographical procedures can seem to undergird statements that simply aren’t true.”
—James M. Hutchisson, The Citadel

Topics

Frontmatter Publicly Available Download PDF	i
Contents Publicly Available Download PDF	v
Acknowledgments Publicly Available Download PDF	ix
Abbreviations Publicly Available Download PDF	xi
The Legend of “The Yellow Wall-paper” Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	1
“The Yellow Wall-paper”
The Yellow Wall-pap er Charlotte Perkins Stetson Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	27
Textual Notes Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	43
Documents of the Case Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	81
Appendix: Printings of “The Yellow Wall-paper,” 1892-1997 Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	121

Language: English
Publisher: Penn State University Press
Audience: Professional and scholarly;
Pages
- Main content: 144
Illustrations
- Illustrations: 10
- Images: 10
- Other: 10 illustrations
Keywords: American victimization; woman; neurasthenic condition; misdiagnosed; mistreated; misunderstood; insanity; prisoner; bedroom; pre-copy-text; W. D. Howells Horace Scudder; The Atlantic Monthly; Great American Short Stories; us; united states; usa

eBook

Published: May 26, 2021
ISBN: 9780271074122