This essay examines how the evolving feminist reception of Charlotte Perkins Gilman's "The Yellow Wallpaper" has mirrored the major debates within feminist literary criticism from 1973 to 1993. Early readings challenged the pathologizing responses of male contemporaries, starting from Elaine Showalter's "feminist critique" and then moving toward a gynocritical celebration of the narrator as a figure of female creativity and resistance. Later critics, however, questioned the essentialist impulses behind such celebratory interpretations, arguing that the narrator's voice is shaped, even scripted, by patriarchal discourse. These constructivist readings, while sometimes accused of political defeatism, insist on distinguishing genuine liberation from its patriarchal mirror image. More recent scholarship expands the field further by foregrounding race, class, and sexuality, revealing how earlier feminist readings often reproduced the exclusions they sought to contest. This essay also considers the problem of "men in feminism," noting how certain male-authored interpretations replicate the androcentrism of the doctor-husband within the story itself. Ultimately, the essay argues that the critical history of "The Yellow Wallpaper" offers a condensed map of feminist criticism's shifting priorities, anxieties, and aspirations.
Douglas Keesey (Fri,) studied this question.