In the following essay, Wagner-Martin, a noted feminist scholar and frequent essayist on women writers, takes the one-hundredth anniversary of "The Yellow Wallpaper" as an opportunity to comment on the schism in women's lives caused by their sometimes conflicting roles of being both an individual and a mother.
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 women, linked together in their martyred and futile lives through the mother-daughter bond. For at least these hundred years, since Charlotte Perkins Gilman wrote her controversial and relentlessly accurate "The Yellow Wallpaper," women writers have confronted the basic conflicts of women's lives: how to be both a person and.....
This is a free excerpt of 135 words. This section contains 1,724 words. This
study guide contains 13,885 words (approx. 46 pages at 300
words per page).
Read the rest of this Literature Guide with our The Yellow Wallpaper Access Pass.
