Charlotte Perkins Gilman

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Charlotte Perkins Gilman

Charlotte Perkins Gilman

Joylyn Case

Rasmussen College-Am. Lit. Section 01

Charlotte Perkins Gilman

Charlotte Perkins Gilman was born July 3, 1860 in Hartford, Connecticut. Gilman had a difficult childhood. Her father Frederick Beecher Perkins was a relative of well-known Beecher family, which included Harriet Beecher Stowe (the author of "Uncle Tom's Cabin"). After her father abandoned his family her mother, Mary Anne Fitch Westcott, denied her two children of any affection. They were extremely poor, which forced them to move from relative to relative to survive. Her education greatly suffered because of this only receiving limited formal education, which she made up for in her extensive reading. Gilman enrolled in the Rhode Island school of design, in 1878; she was able to support herself by tutoring and an artist of trade cards.

In 1884, Gilman married Charles Stetson and three months after she finds out she is pregnant with their daughter, Katherine.

It is then that she begins suffering from symptoms of depression. In 1885, after Katherine was born, she begins treatment with Dr. Silas Weir Mitchell when she is overwhelmed with depression. Dr. Mitchell favors the "rest cure" for treatment, which in the end is the worst thing for Gilman. This experience is what inspired her 1892 short story "The Yellow Wall-Paper." She was only able to come back from the edge of her mental break when she went back to writing, which she contributed to the Boston Woman's Journal often, even though she suffered her whole life of extensive periods of depression (Baym,2010). She concluded about "The Yellow Wall-paper": "It was not intended to drive people crazy, but to save people from being driven crazy, and it worked" (Baym, 2010).

In 1888 Gilman separated from Stetson and moved...