Yellow Wall Paper, The. Boxed with Moving the Mountain.
Gilman, Charlotte Perkins Stetson. The Yellow Wall Paper. Boston: Rockwell & Churchill Press, 1899.
Slender 8vo.; black cloth; yellow and black dust-jacket with claustrophobic repeating wallpaper design.
Together with:
Gilman, Charlotte Perkins. Moving the Mountain. New York: Charlton Company, 1911.
First editions of these two seminal and extremely uncommon texts.
Moving the Mountain, which has not been reprinted since its debut in 1911, was Gilman’s first attempt at a utopian feminist vision; it is an important precursor to Herland, her best known utopian novel. Both stories envision a gender-equal society of the future. But Herland discounts the possibility of female equality in a world containing men, while the earlier tale maintains a less radical perspective. In Moving the Mountain men and women live together happily in a democratic socialist society, where the competitive and aggressive characteristics of male-dominated capitalism have been eliminated. “The mothering and education of the young, carried out by trained specialists, creates a new kind of generation quickly, and so the destructive, excessive male qualities inherited from a historic past are rapidly bred out” (To Herland and Beyond: The Life and Work of Charlotte Perkins Gilman, by Ann J. Lane, NY: Pantheon, 1990, p. 292). Moving the Mountain captures Gilman at her most optimistic, just as The Yellow Wall Paper reflects her at her most pessimistic. Together the two—one early, one late; one horror, one ideal fantasy—stand as a testament to the range of Gilman’s fecund imagination.
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