How Charlotte Perkins Gilman Inspired the Name of This Blog

The name Toadstools and Sprouts is a nod to the work of Charlotte Perkins Gilman‘s most widely known work: The Yellow Wallpaper (1892). This long-form short story is written from the perspective of a depressed young wife and mother who has been confined, with all her creative outlets forbidden to her.

It is safe to say that today women have more autonomy over their lives, but we still have constraints that still resonate in this 134 year old work. As the protagonist struggles with her confinement the walls start to close in on her and the wallpaper’s pattern becomes:

“…a pattern is a florid arabesque, reminding one of a fungus. If you can imagine a toadstool in joints, an interminable string of toadstools, budding and sprouting in endless convolutions—why, that is something like it.

After criticism of the story by male physician Charlotte felt compelled to explain why she wrote the story. In essence:

“I then, using the remnant of intelligence that remained, and helped by a wise fiend, I cast the noted .specialist’s advice to the winds and went to work again--'work, the normal Iife of every human being; work, in which is joy and growth and service, without which one is a pauper and a parasite; ultimately recovering some measure of power”.

There will be many women out there today who can still relate to this 134 year old story. The frustration of not being heard, of feeling your creativity is stifled or thwarted, and so many more reasons. I love these two quotes, they speak to me, as if I was having a one-to-one conversation with Charlotte.

I am about to embark on a new path in life and I have thrown other peoples’ opinion’s to the wind to take myself of on a physical journey around the UK exploring bookshops, places and people.

Unlike Charlotte I am fortunate enough to hold a postgraduate degree from the University of Wolverhampton, which has given me the opportunity to explore the creative outlets I enjoy. My passion is literacy, literature, books and knowledge and the way in which literature holds a unique and valuable place in the world of reason. Literacy is a symbol of ideas, defiance, acceptance, originality, individuality; it is an inter-disciplinary skill with notions of art, science, philosophy, history, and current affairs.

I will blog primarily about my research interests and books that I am reading, but there are other areas of interest outside of my primary research that I'd like to talk about, but all my blogs will be framed around literature.

The Yellow Wallpaper is readily available on the internet, but if you prefer a physical copy you can try my local bookshop in Crosby Pritchards Bookshop (I do not get a commission for this).

Charlotte Anna Perkins Gilman née Perkins; July 3, 1860 – August 17, 1935), also known by her first married name Charlotte Perkins Stetson.