The Yellow Wallpaper

Catherine Golden (Essay Date 1992)

SOURCE: Golden, Catherine. "One Hundred Years of Reading 'The Yellow Wallpaper.'" In The Captive Imagination: A Casebook on "The Yellow Wallpaper," edited by Catherine Golden, pp. 1-23. New York: The Feminist Press, 1992.

In the following essay, Golden offers a comprehensive overview of criticism on The Yellow Wallpaper.

The redefinition of the literary canon has directed attention to a number of overlooked works by late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century women writers. Prominent among this group is Charlotte Perkins Gilman's "The Yellow Wallpaper." From its first publication in the January 1892 issue of New England Magazine¹ until the early 1970s, "The Yellow Wallpaper" was virtually unknown; it found its way into only a few collections of short fiction between 1892 and 1972.² A cursory glance at the chronologically arranged Table of Contents and Bibliography of this book reveals the critical...