SOURCE: “‘But One Expects That’: Charlotte Perkins Gilman's ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’ and the Shifting Light of Scholarship,” in PMLA, Vol. 111, No. 1, January, 1996, pp. 52-65.

In the following essay, Dock discusses the publication and critical history of “The Yellow Wallpaper.”

In the two decades since the Feminist Press issued a slim volume containing a text of “The Yellow Wallpaper” with an afterword by Elaine R. Hedges, Charlotte Perkins Gilman's remarkable work has found a secure place in contemporary literary studies. Omitting “The Yellow Wallpaper” from an American literature anthology has become almost as unthinkable as leaving out “The Raven” or “Civil Disobedience.” The story appears not just in those weighty, two-volume collections of American literature but also in textbooks for courses in women's studies and genre studies and in dozens of introductory literature texts for undergraduates.¹ It has been analyzed by literary historians of every stripe, although feminist critics...