Charlotte Perkins Gilman Research Paper

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Molly Dempsey Professor Larry Speight LI 220-779 1 October 2014 Charlotte Perkins Gilman Charlotte Perkins Gilman was born on July 3rd, 1860 in Hartford, Connecticut to Mary Perkins and Frederick Beecher Perkins. She had a brother, Thomas Adie, who was fourteen months older than her and her mother and father were afraid to have any more children because a physician warned Perkins that she could die if she bore another child. While Charlotte was still a young child, her father walked out on her, her mother, and her brother leaving them meager support. Mary Perkins was not a very affectionate woman, but wanted to keep them from being hurt in the same way that she had been. To do so she forbade her children from building strong friendships…show more content…
In 1894, Gilman and Stetson legally divorced and Stetson married a good friend of Gilman’s, Grace Ellery Channing, and Gilman sent Katherine back east to live with her father and his new wife because Gilman said that Katherine had a right to know and love her father just as Stetson had the right to be a part of his daughter’s life. In her memoirs, Gilman reported that she was happy for her ex-husband and his new wife was as good a mother as Gilman was and perhaps better in some ways. (Wikipedia, Web Charlotte Perkins…show more content…
This story was half fiction, but in a way half true. In 1887 Gilman went to see a specialist in hopes of curing her reoccurring nervous breakdowns. The physician prescribed her to a “rest-cure”. This meant for her to lie in bed all day and engage in no more than two hours of intellectual activity. In her short story, The Yellow Wallpaper, Gilman describes the physician office as a hotel which she is staying in while her husband and herself are on vacation and while her husband, a physician, is at work her sister-in-law tends to Gilman’s needs and checks in on her every day. Even though Gilman is not supposed to be engaging herself in such strenuous intellectual activity, she finds that is puts her nervous break downs at rest for a little while to write about her feelings and emotions. She writes the story as if she were writing in a diary or journal and not something that others will ever read. When Gilman saw her husband or sister-in-law coming to the room she hid away the papers and pretended she had done nothing but rest just as her physician had prescribed. Gilman says that after three months of being in solitary confinement she was near the border line of utter mental ruin. (Shmoop Editorial

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