The Yellow Wall-Paper

"This volume offers both Gilman scholars and scholars of textual studies a unique and helpful means of engaging with a work that exists in multiple forms, and includes some insightful new readings of this much-analyzed story," says Charlotte Rich, editor of the Charlotte Perkins Gilman Newsletter. Scholars have argued for decades over which constitutes the best possible version of Charlotte Perkins Gilman's much-anthologized story “The Yellow Wall-Paper.” Most editions have been based on the1892 New England Magazine publication rather than the handwritten manuscript at Radcliffe College. Publication of the unedited manuscript in 1994 sparked controversy over which of the two was definitive. Since then, scholars have discovered half a dozen parent texts for later twentieth-century printings, including William Dean Howells' version from 1920 and the 1933 Golden Book version. While traditional critical editions gather evidence and make an argument for adopting one text as preferable to others, Shawn St. Jean's “The Yellow Wall-Paper” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman: A Dual-Text Critical Edition offers instead both manuscript and magazine, critically edited and printed in parallel for the first time. When viewed as part of a process beginning with writing and ending with bibliographic coding, new significance appears in such facets as the magazine's accompanying illustrations, its lineation and paragraphing, Gilman's choice of minor pronouns, and her original handwritten ending. This critical edition of “The Yellow Wall-Paper” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman includes a full and nontraditional apparatus for ease of use by students and scholars to study the more than 400 variants between the two. Four new essays, written especially for this volume, explore the implications of this multitext model. Shawn St.Jean, an independent scholar in Brockport, New York, has previously published on Charlotte Perkins Gilman in Studies in Bibliography, Feminist Studies, and Studies in Short Fiction. He is the author of Pagan Dreiser: Songs from American Mythology.