Triptych Ep 8 | A Rock, A Mother’s Yellow Wallpaper, and a Local Hero

Charlotte Perkins Gilman (as she became after her second marriage) suffered intolerable hardships in the lead-up and aftermath of giving birth in 1885 to her only child, Katherine. Today, she would be swiftly diagnosed with severe postpartum depression, but of course in the 1880s and 90s, the concept was light years from a medic’s vocabulary. She was given a ‘rest cure’, a strictly policed form enforced solitude and passivity: confined to bed, barred from social interactions, limited diet, minimal mental stimulation (so little or no reading or writing). If anything was guaranteed to aggravate mental illness, this was it.

Highly unusual for the time, she finally divorced her husband Charles Stetson in 1894, although both had recognised that would be necessary as early as 1888.

She wrote what would become her most famous  short story, The Yellow Wallpaper, in 1890, about a young mother’s ghastly plummet into madness in circumstances that clearly echoed her own. It is brilliantly paced but utterly chilling in its artful, unreliable narrative that manages to speak with piercing clarity. It’s easy to see why it became a staple of feminist literature, but it shouldn’t be confined to such labels.