517For a time, Charlotte accepted his regimen.“I went home,
followed those directions rigidly for months, and came per-
ilously close to losing my mind,” she noted. Then she decided
to “cast off Dr. Mitchell bodily” and “do exactly as I pleased.”
She separated from her husband, took her child to
Pasadena, California, and wrote essays, editorials, and fiction.
In 1890 she finished “The Yellow Wallpaper,” a story
about a young wife who, suffering from depression, was
confined by her doctor-husband to bed in an upstairs room,
with servants tending to her every need. As she endlessly
stared at her surroundings, the designs on the wallpaper
changed shape; a figure appeared and wandered in and out
of her consciousness. The wallpaper then grew bars that
locked her, and the shadowy figure, into the room. Unable to
escape through the bars, the woman chewed at the bed,
fleeing ultimately into madness. The story was well-received
as a literary horror story reminiscent of Edgar Allan Poe.
Having at last purged Mitchell from her psyche,
Charlotte wrote incessantly and supported herself by giving
lectures. She developed close and even intimate relation-
ships with several women. When she sent her daughter to
live with her father, newspapers denounced her for neglect-
ing woman’s proper function. Then she fell in love with
Houghton Gilman, who accepted her refusal to embrace
John Singer Sargent painted this imposing portrait of S. Weir Mitchell (1903). Mitchell,
who devised “the rest cure” for neurasthenics, wrote several successful novels.domesticity.“I must notfocus on ‘home duties’ and entangle
myself with them,” she told him. They married in 1900.
Charlotte’s first book,Women and Economics(1898), was
a work of extraordinary creativity. A thoroughgoing Social
Darwinist, Charlotte explained that while women once were
indispensable providers, they had become economically
dependent on men who performed important and lucrative
work; women’s dependence obliged them to exaggerate
their sexuality and domesticity so as to attract the men who
would provide for them. Marriage was founded on women’s
economic subjugation. Marx was wrong: Gender, not class,
was the fundamental social distinction. The most important
revolution would promote women’s independence by allow-
ing them to work outside the home.
In this and subsequent books and articles, Charlotte
Perkins Gilman insisted that the domestic ideal had deprived
society of women’s creativity and ideas. Her own life was a case
in point. With only four years of education, none after the age
of fifteen, she achieved economic independence through her
own heroic effort. Lacking alternative child-care arrangements,
she sent her young child to live with her father so that she
could pursue her life and work as an intellectual. The decision
would psychologically scar both her and her daughter, but her
work anticipated many of the themes of modern feminism.