A History of American Literature

290 Reconstructing, Reimagining: 1865–1900

she describes is utterly real to her. The subtlety of the story, in turn, issues from the

way the author frames the narrator, allowing us to see what she does not see, just

how much her manacles are mind-forged and man-forged. “John says” is a constant,

deferential refrain in the tale. Even when John denies precisely what the narrator

most wants, she is reluctant to resist him. She writes her journal, this story, in secret,

for instance, because she knows he does not like her to write. “He hates me to write

a word,” she confesses, “but I must say what I feel and think in some way – it is such

a relief!” Subject to the prevailing pieties about the superior wisdom of men and the

necessary subordination of women, she is forced into guilt or denial. She can only

write herself on the secret paper of her journal or the wallpaper. Gilman shows us all

this, while never permitting us to waver in our sympathy for the narrator, or to feel

the grip of her own rapt imagination upon our own. We know her strange experiences

because we share them, but we also know the motives, the reasons for them; we are

compelled to see them as necessary, inevitable delusions. “The Yellow Wall-Paper” is

one of the most compelling accounts in American literature of male suppression and

female subjection, and the tortured consequences to which both can lead. It is also,

as Gilman surely intended, a revelation of what the denial of human need can bring

about for anyone – of how humanity, if it is repressed, will always have its revenge.

The Development of Many Americas

Things fall apart

Henry Adams (1838–1918) was also interested in the rights and the condition of

women. In 1876 he delivered an influential lecture on “The Primitive Rights of

Women.” His first novel, Democracy (1880), explores not only political life

in Washington but the contemporary situation of American women; so does his

second novel, Esther (1884). And in his two most celebrated and important works,

Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres (privately printed in 1904, published in 1913) and

The Education of Henry Adams (privately printed in 1907, published in 1918), he was

to explore his theory of feminine force and, in particular, the unifying cultural power

embodied in the figure of the Virgin. Adams was descended from one of the most

powerful dynasties in American history. The grandson of the sixth president of the

United States, and the great-grandson of the second president, he served as private

secretary to his father, the American diplomatic representative in London, during

the Civil War. He taught history at Harvard, where he had also been educated, from

1870 to 1877, edited the North American Review during the same period; and he

wrote numerous histories and political essays. His most important contribution to

formal history was his History of the United States During the Administration of

Thomas Jefferson and James Madison (1889–1891), a book that follows the develop-

ment of political life in the United States up to the arrival of John Monroe as the fifth

president. Adams used Germanic scholarly methods here. He also hoped to locate a

key to the American past that could be used predictively to apply to the American

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