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

In the following essay, Wagner-Martin examines the relevance of “The Yellow Wallpaper” to the experience of contemporary motherhood.

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 women, linked together in their martyred and futile lives through the mother-daughter bond...