SOURCE: Wagner-Martin, Linda. “Gilman's ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’: A Centenary.” In Charlotte Perkins Gilman: The Woman and Her Work, edited by Sheryl L. Meyering, pp. 51-64. Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1989.

In the following essay, Wagner-Martin discusses the themes of motherhood and self-identity in “The Yellow Wallpaper,” asserting that the story is “a splendid example of gender-based narrative.”

A friend is dead.

We cannot discount pain but the least bearable pain is the husband's cry of anger: You cannot die. I need you. The children need you. Your duty is to us.

The answer to that is silence.

Written by the author for a friend who died at the age of 39.

It seems no accident that important recent novels have been Toni Morrison's Beloved, about the power of a sacrificed child over her mourning mother's life, and Marilyn French's Her Mother's Daughter, a major fiction about four generations of...