Scudders's comment on the yellow wallpaper
Excerpted for fair use in the classroom from The Yellow Wallpaper, Brooklyn : The Feminist Press, 1973.
...It wasn't easy for Charlotte Perkins Gilman to get her story published. She sent
it first to William Dean Howells, and he, responding to at least some of its
power and authenticity, recommended it to Horace Scudder, editor of The Atlantic
Monthly, then the most prestigious magazine in the United States. Scudder
rejected the story, according to Gilman's account in her autobiography, with a
curt note:
In the 1890s editors, and especially Scudder, still officially adhered to a canon
of "moral uplift" in literature, and Gilman's story, with its heroine reduced at
the end to the level of a groveling animal, scarcely fitted the prescribed
formula. One wonders, however, whether hints of the story's attack on social
mores--specifically on the ideal of the submissive wife--came through to Scudder
and unsettled him?
The story was finally published, in May 1892, in Tbe New England Magazine, where
it was greeted with strong but mixed feelings. Gilman was warned that such
stories were "perilous stuff," which should not be printed because of the threat
they posed to the relatives of such "deranged" persons as the
heroines...
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9/3/96