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Wild Unrest: Charlotte Perkins Gilman and the Making of "The Yellow Wall-Paper"

A Woman Ahead of Her Time. Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz. Wild Unrest: Charlotte Perkins Gilman and the Making of "The Yellow W all-Paper." Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010. 251 pp. ISBN 9780199739806. $24.95 hb.Reviewed by Kelly A. O'Connor-SalomonWild Unrest is an unusual text, and that is perhaps appropriate because it concerns an unusual woman. While the book will appeal primarily to literary scholars, its potential sphere of interest goes well beyond that. It is a book about Charlotte Perkins Gilman the writer, to be sure, but it is also a book about one woman's struggle to be who she wants to be at a time when women could not do that - particularly when their desires conflicted with what society said was proper. In addition, Horowitz recounts the early years of psychology as a modern field of study. As such, Wild Unrest has something to say to scholars in many fields: literature, women's studies, psychology, and even American history, because the story of Gilman is also the story of an American woman who doubtless shared the same experiences as many other American women of her time.Horowitz takes a different approach to studying Gilman - looking at her as a young woman and the years leading up to the writing of "The Yellow Wallpaper," Gilman's most famous work. The actual creation of the story is not the focus - it is what happened to this woman to bring her to create such a story - and that is what makes the book intriguing. In order to draw as accurate a picture as possible, stripping away "the myths Gilman created about 'The Yellow Wallpaper'" (4), Horowitz relies on letters to and from Gilman as well as journal entries written by her and her first husband. It is an attempt to let the people speak for themselves - to see them before the story happened - before the myth was created.Charlotte Perkins Gilman was a complicated person and this comes through in the text. Born in the wrong time, her mindset and personality would fit well in the twenty-first century, but she was perceived as abnormal in her own time. Of course, the irony is that, by being average if she lived today, she never would have had cause to write the story that made her famous.The most interesting part of Horowitz's text is the account of Gilman's first marriage to Charles Walter Stetson. Early in her life, Gilman decided that she would not marry; she felt doing so would give too much control to the part of herself she wanted to suppress - "that useful animal a wife and a mother" (28). Against this side she contrasted what she referred to as "myself as a self" - the side of her that "had the capacity to be equal to that of a man" (28). However, despite her determination to remain single, Gilman found herself sexually attracted to Walter, and she proposed what she thought was the perfect arrangement: they would live independently, so she could still be her own person, but they would meet for sex. Unfortunately, Walter was not as progressive as she was, and he refused her offer. As he stated in his diary, "[I]f I married her, I married her; and she must be my wife and my companion and live with me all the time" (59). In the end, Gilman acquiesced, and Walter agreed to marriage.Gilman began to experience depressive episodes at the age of fifteen. As she got older, those episodes seemed to come more frequently, last longer, and be tied to periods of stress, particularly when what she wanted conflicted with what society told her to want. As her relationship with Walter deepened, her depressive episodes became more alarming - to Charlotte and to everyone around her. …