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Charlotte Perkins Gilman and Zelda Fitzgerald provide unique insight into the patriarchal worlds they lived in through autobiographical accounts of their lives. The Living of Charlotte Perkins Gilman and the diaries of Gilman and her first husband, Charles Walter Stetson, serve as Gilman’s autobiographical texts of the period before, during, and immediately after her breakdown. The correspondence between Fitzgerald and her husband, F. Scott Fitzgerald, as well as Scott’s letters to Zelda’s psychiatrists serve as a biographical (and, in the case of her letters to Scott, autobiographical) account of her life during the period of her institutionalizations, from 1930 up to Scott’s death in 1940. These biographies and autobiographies, studied in conjunction with their fictionalized autobiographical accounts, Gilman’s “The Yellow Wall-Paper” and Fitzgerald’s Save Me The Waltz, illustrate the struggles these women, and by extension, many women of their time, experienced when they were unable to live up to the expectations a patriarchal society placed on them to be perfect wives and mothers. The construction of the feminine by the patriarchy required women to be complacent, meek, dependent, and infantile, and this construction, complicated by the issues of institutionalization and hysteria, is at the heart of the works of Gilman and Fitzgerald. The subtexts present in their fiction demonstrate that Gilman and Fitzgerald not only understood and felt the pressure of the patriarchal construction of femininity, but were acutely aware of how it could exert itself on women, particularly white, economically privileged women. Both authors, victims of the same patriarchal mechanism that dominated society during the turn of the twentieth century, provide insight into their own perspectives through their autobiographies, and then create fictional worlds in which the implications of these perspectives are realized to the detriment of their protagonists. While critics have examined this focus within individual stories by these writers, they have not been examined together in a comprehensive discussion of the patriarchal construction of the feminine and its manifestation in the autobiographical/biographical and fictional works of Charlotte Perkins Gilman and Zelda Fitzgerald.

Since 1973, the year in which Elaine Hedges's groundbreaking edition of "The Yellow Wallpaper" was published, Charlotte Perkins Gilman's short story has been read primarily as one of America's leading feminist texts. With potent symbolism and a fragmented style of narration, it is easy to understand why many feminist scholars fashion the story's narrator into a proactive feminist, a courageous heroine who rebels against patriarchal oppression. While this trend of interpretation compellingly attempts to empower the narrator, it often overlooks her perspective of disability and projects the characteristics of a nondisabled, high-functioning feminist on a mentally ill woman. This paper reads Gilman's short story as a narrative of mental illness and applies the research of feminist disability scholars Anita Silvers, Jenny Morris, and Susan Wendell to a close reading of the story. Approaching the story from this perspective, we can identify the systems of oppression that disable the narrator and read "The Yellow Wallpaper" in a way that validates the subjective reality of depression and invites disabled voices into feminism's exploration of womanhood.

Abstract This paper will attempt to analyze how similar forms of power play are manifested towards the protagonists in both The Bell Jar and “The Yellow Wallpaper”. The aim of the essay is to investigate how power play affects the protagonists’ relations with their caregivers and how it affects their treatments. Thus, the hypothesis is that it is the power play that prevents the protagonists in “The Yellow Wallpaper” and The Bell Jar from recovering from their mental illness, which is confirmed by my analysis. Therefore, the concept of power play will be used in the essay as an instrument of analysis. The hypothesis will be discussed from five main points: obstacles to recovery, caregivers’ role in recovery, patients’ response to treatment, the role of power play, and the negative impact which power play has on recovery. Keywords: Power play, mental illness, treatment, recovery, patient-caregiver relationship, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Sylvia Plath, Reet Sjögren.

This dissertation contributes to the discipline by demonstrating successful and productive incorporation of feminist research methods and methodologies in rhetorical studies and the application of the rhetorical arts to feminist projects. Specifically this dissertation examines the history of state-sanctioned marriage in the US and its contribution to normative discourses of family that problematically inform public policies and mainstream arguments directed at some working and parenting women struggling to care for their families and provide for them economically. Through feminist rhetorical analyses of congressional testimony on welfare; feminist rhetorics on women, work, family, and economics; and narratives of women's lived experiences derived from an interview-based study, this project renders visible and disrupts mechanizations of privilege and oppression deployed through hegemonic discourses on marriage and family. It concludes that feminist rhetorical scholars are uniquely trained and therefore called upon to address inequities promulgated through national attachment to state-sanctioned marriage and normative models of family.

Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1860-1935), writer and lecturer, provided philosophical guidance to the feminist movement of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, During a career spanning the years 1890 to 1935 she published eleven books, wrote articles for popular magazines, and lectured throughout the United States and Europe. Between 1909 and 1916 she wrote, edited, and published a monthly magazine entitled The Forerunner. Gilman's efforts dealt primarily with the status of women, but she described herself as a humanist rather than a feminist. She explained that her interest in women arose from a concern that, as one-half of humanity, their restricted role in society retarded human progress. Thus, Gilman's contribution to feminism must be viewed within the context of her humanist philosophy. Gilman's contribution to feminism lies in her diagnosis of woman's predicament as ideological rather than political and, hence, subject to self-resolution. The uniqueness of Gilman's approach is in the autonomous nature of her solution: Woman, through the full use of her human powers, could achieve the equality that decades of political agitation had failed to accomplish. The rationale for this dissertation lies in the premise that Gilman's humanist approach to feminism made a significant contribution in her own day and offers insight into women's present status.

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This dissertation suggests that burgeoning public discourse on contraception in Britain and the United States between 1915 and 1940 created a paradigm shift in perceptions of women’s sexuality that altered the ways that women could be represented in literary texts. It offers readings of texts by women on both sides of the Atlantic who responded to birth control discourse not only by referencing contraceptive techniques, but also by incorporating arguments and dilemmas used by birth control advocates into their writing. The introductory chapter, which frames the later literary analysis chapters, examines similarities in the tropes Margaret Sanger and Marie Stopes, the British and American “Mothers of Birth Control” used in their advocacy. These include images such as mothers dying in childbirth, younger children in large families weakened by their mothers’ ill-health, and sexual dysfunction in traditional marriages. In addition to this chapter on birth control advocates’ texts, the dissertation includes four chapters meant to demonstrate how literary authors used and adapted the tropes and language of the birth control movement to their own narratives and perspectives. The first of these chapters focuses on Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Herland, a 1915 political allegory about a nation populated only by women who have gained the ability to reproduce asexually. Gilman adopted pro-birth control language, but rejected the politically radical ideas of the early birth control movement. In addition to radical politics, the birth control movement was associated with racist eugenicist ideas, an association that the third chapter, on Nella Larsen’s 1928 novel Quicksand examines in detail by comparing birth control and African-American racial uplift rhetoric. Crossing the Atlantic, the fourth chapter looks at the influence of the English birth control movement on Irish novelist Kate O’Brien’s 1931 Without My Cloak, a novel that challenges Catholic narratives as well as the heteronormative assumptions of birth control discourse itself. The final chapter analyzes Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway (1925) and Three Guineas (1938), illuminating Woolf’s connections between feminist reproductive politics and conservative pro-eugenics agendas. Acknowledging the complexity of these writers’ engagements with the birth control movement, the project explores not simply the effects of the movement’s discourse on writers’ depictions of sexuality, reproduction, and race, but also the dialogue between literary writers and the birth control establishment, which comprises a previously overlooked part of the formation of both the reproductive rights movement and the Modernist political project.

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