SOURCE: Heilmann, Ann. “Overwriting Decadence: Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Oscar Wilde, and the Feminization of Art in ‘The Yellow Wallpaper.’” In The Mixed Legacy of Charlotte Perkins Gilman, edited by Catherine J. Golden and Joanna Schneider Zangrando, pp. 175-88. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2000.

In the following essay, Heilmann asserts that Gilman challenged the dominant nineteenth-century patriarchal discourse on high art by transforming her own ideas about art and politics into the narrative of “The Yellow Wallpaper,” thereby mapping “the transition from male aestheticism to a new female aesthetic.”

When William Dean Howells approached Charlotte Perkins Gilman about the inclusion of “The Yellow Wall-Paper” [“The Yellow Wallpaper”] in his Great American Short Stories, she told him that it “was no more ‘literature’ than [her] other stuff, being definitely written ‘with a purpose,’” adding that “[i]n [her] judgment it [was] a pretty poor thing to write … without a purpose...