Other critics uneasily received the story as a reproduction of gothic ghost stories popular earlier in the century that featured eerie atmospheres and unexplained phenomena, and let the piece largely alone. \u00a0William Dean Howells, an early supporter of Gilman and other women writers of the period, reprinted her story thirty years later in his collection <\/span>Great American Modern Stories. <\/span><\/i>But even he somewhat apprehensively introduced it as \u201cterrible and too wholly dire\u201d to appear comfortably in printed anthologies alighting in drawing rooms and respectable parlors. \u00a0Later critics questioned this response, arguing that the reading public, so recently exposed to the popularized tales of horror by Poe and other late romantics, were not too fragile to register just any tale of insanity and delusion. \u00a0As Susan Lanser writes, editors like Howells and Scudder, and presumably their reading publics, were \u201cwere surely balking at something more particular: the \u2018graphic\u2019 representation of \u2018raving lunacy\u2019 in a middle-class mother and wife that revealed the rage of the woman on a pedestal\u201d(Lanser 417-18). Although Gilman remained an active writer, speaker, and activist until her death in 1935, \u201cThe Yellow Wallpaper\u201d faded from the public view and critical conversations. \u00a0(A great deal of popular fiction penned by women in the 19<\/span>th<\/span> and early 20<\/span>th<\/span> centuries suffered the same fate during the period, which was marked by the development of literary criticism as a specialized field, a new spirit of hyper-canonicity, and the dominance of certain powerful figures with specific tastes and distastes). \u00a0And after her death, most of her works \u2013 including the<\/span> Herland<\/span><\/i> triology, a utopian fantasy of a hidden, all-female culture marked by peacefulness, generosity, and a deeply disturbing commitment to racial purity and eugenics, her economic theories of gender inequality and her feminist manifestoe \u2013 were largely lost, hidden, and forgotten for fifty years. \u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n The development of feminist literary criticism in the late 60s and early 70s, however, placed an emphasis on rediscovery of literary pasts and cultural histories. \u00a0Feminist critics scoured libraries and catalogs, and worked to reconstruct the bodies of work of dozens of forgotten, ignored, disparaged or disregarded novelists and writers, like Edith Wharton, Susan Glaspell, Kate Chopin, Sarah Orne Jewett, and Charlotte Perkins Gilman. \u00a0Elaine Hedges came upon the story in 1972, and described it as a \u201csmall literary masterpiece,” (Shumaker 588)\u00a0 \u201cThe Yellow Wallpaper\u201d soon inspired a rush of attention from other interested scholars, like Annette Kolodny and Sandra Gilbert, who found an impossibly powerful symbolic parallel in the story of a woman writer confined and reduced to a fracture of the self, and the actual fate of the story in modern America. \u00a0Gilman became a hero of the new feminist movement, and \u201cThe Yellow Wallpaper\u201d a rallying testament and flagship piece of literature. \u00a0It was proof of how literary criticism had failed and hurt women writers, and it was an incredible story of madness, triumph, and despair.<\/p>\n However, although the 1970s brought a wealth of lost literature, art and new frontiers of theory and criticism, it is essential to realize that these early efforts almost entirely focused solely on the neglected works and lives of upper middle class white women, based largely in New England. \u00a0Indeed, such an observation actually stands in as a criticism of early second-wave feminism as a whole. \u00a0In many ways, this movement was one that was supremely interested in the needs and realities of only a very specific <\/span>kind <\/span><\/i>of woman: one that was rich enough, straight enough, U.S. born enough, and, most importantly, white enough. \u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n And Gilman, although a brilliant, profound thinker and writer, likewise developed violent, racist ideas in her non-fiction and fiction alike. \u00a0In 1989, Susan Lanser penned a critique called \u201cFeminist Criticism, \u201cThe Yellow Wallpaper,\u201d and the Politics of Color in America\u201d which set off a new era of reading for the complicated story. \u00a0\u00a0After carefully detailing the story\u2019s history, it\u2019s erasure, and its new pre-eminence, Lanser argues that, due to its status as a somewhat sacred text of 1970s feminism, and perhaps because of the faults of that particular movement, readers have condemned Gilman, her narrator, and the lurking, creeping women of the wallpaper to the original illegibility, confinement, and erasure that they originally railed against. \u00a0\u00a0Rather, everyone is reading for what they want to see, instead of what is actually there \u2013 and they are thus missing a huge piece of Gilman\u2019s narrative. \u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n Lanser returns to the history of the late 19<\/span>th<\/span> century American obsession with anti-immigration platforms and sharply developed racism against people perceived to have Japanese or Chinese ancestry in particular. \u00a0Reading the text \u201cwithin the discourse of racial anxiety\u201d(Lanser 427) necessary to actually read and write about writing from the 1890s, Lanser develops an intricate, compelling argument that does not necessarily <\/span>condemn<\/span><\/i> the text as racist, xenophobic, and unforgiveable \u2013 but complicates it with the history of the turn of the century\u2019s racist rhetoric regarding \u201cThe Yellow Peril,\u201d the perceived failure of white women to reproduce properly, and the white terror at the thought of immigrant women, poor women and women of color reproducing at higher rates. \u00a0The crimes of Gilman\u2019s narrator, then, can be read as not only refusing to comply with coded gender behaviors, but actively endangering the dominance of her race by going crazy instead of having more babies. \u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n When we consider the history of hysteria and the particular kind of misogyny and sexism that the story describes, we also can see that even oppression is deeply coded by class and race. \u00a0\u00a0In her article \u201cThe Race of Hysteria,\u201d Laura Briggs explores how the invention of the \u201cdisease\u201d, and the \u201cnervous conditions\u201d that so many white women were diagnosed with were predicated on the ideologies of \u201cover-civilization\u201d and \u201csavagery\u201d that were used to class black women, immigrant women, and even poor women as <\/span>others<\/span><\/i>, and how black women were not only perceived as being impugn to the symptoms, but that these fabricated \u201cdifferences\u201d of body were weaponized to further invent caustic, violent narratives of race and racism that address and oppress women of color. <\/span><\/p>\n If we are to read thoughtfully, it is impossible to read any American narrative without comprehending that the existence of race, while perhaps not fore-fronted by the author, is a defining, shaping feature of the text. \u00a0The experiences of \u201cThe Yellow Wallpaper\u2019s\u201d narrator are precisely those of an upper middle class white woman of the period. \u00a0It does not discount her suffering, struggle, or experience to recognize this fact, but to do the opposite \u2013 to assume, silently and willfully blindly \u2013 that these experiences are representative of the <\/span>whole <\/span><\/i>of womankind \u2013 or even American womankind of that precise period \u2013 decisively enacts violence on the histories, memories, stories, and legacies of women of color living in the United States in the 1890s, and today. \u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n \u201cThe Yellow Wallpaper\u201d is still widely read, and criticism on the work continues to grow and complicate. \u00a0Present scholars of post-colonial studies, queer theory and psychology have continued to open the story and apply pressure to its dangerous, uneasy portions. \u00a0And the exploration by dramatic artists, moving the story into three dimensions and real time, can push our bounds of interpretation even further \u2013 allowing us more and more opportunities to peel the paper off of the walls.<\/p>\n By Kimberly Fanshier<\/p>\n Citations<\/strong>:<\/p>\n Briggs, Laura. “The Race of Hysteria: “Overcivilization” and the “Savage” in Late\u00a0Nineteenth-Century Obstetrics and Gynecology.” American Quarterly<\/em> 52.2 (2000): 246-73.<\/p>\n Lanser, Susan S. “Feminist Criticism, “The Yellow Wallpaper,” and the Politics of\u00a0Color in America.” Feminist Studies<\/em> 15.3 (1989): 415.<\/p>\n Shumaker, Conrad. “”Too Terribly Good to Be Printed”: Charlotte Gilman’s “The\u00a0Yellow Wallpaper”” American Literature<\/em> 57.4 (1985): 588.<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/cohoproductions.org\/old\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/01\/new-england-perkins.jpg\")
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