1) Gilman makes a point on saying that her correspondant asked her if she "had been there." How important is it if she had? Would it have changed our perspective on the story if she hadn't?
2) The Yellow Wallpaper is an excellent picture of depression and a psychotic break from reality. The parallels between Gilman, Poe, and Lovecraft are, to me at least, evident. While Gilman was not a writer of the macabre, do you see her influence in modern horror?
In response to your first question, as long as Gilman was still able to write the story as insightfully and sensitively as she did, I don't think our perspectives as modern readers would change. However, if she had still written the story to, as Gilman put it, "save people from being driven crazy" (349), readers from her time might have wondered about her motivation. Why would she become a literary crusader for this cause unless she had been through the ordeal herself?
ReplyDelete