SOURCE: Gilbert, Sandra, and Susan Gubar. “From The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination.” In The Captive Imagination: A Casebook on “The Yellow Wallpaper,” edited by Catherine Golden, pp. 145-48. New York: Feminist Press at the City University of New York, 1992.

In the following essay, originally published in 1979, Gilbert and Gubar discuss the relationship between madness and female authorship in “The Yellow Wallpaper.”

As if to comment on the unity of all these points—on, that is, the anxiety-inducing connections between what women writers tend to see as their parallel confinements in texts, houses, and maternal female bodies—Charlotte Perkins Gilman brought them all together in 1890 in a striking story of female confinement and escape, a paradigmatic tale which (like Jane Eyre) seems to tell the story that all literary women would tell if they could speak their “speechless woe.” “The Yellow...