The Yellow Wall-Paper (by Charlotte Perkins Gilman)

A complete and accurate rendition of the 1892 Edition, with a New Note on the Text. The Yellow Wall-Paper is written as the secret journal of a woman who, failing to relish the joys of marriage and motherhood, is sentenced to a country rest cure to remedy her 'nervous condition' -- which is actually postpartum depression. Though she longs to write, her husband and doctor forbid it, prescribing instead complete passivity. Locked in her bedroom, the heroine creates a reality of her own beyond the hypnotic pattern of the faded yellow wallpaper -- a pattern that has come to symbolise her own imprisonment. Narrated with superb psychological and dramatic precision, The Yellow Wall-Paper stands out not only for the imaginative authenticity with which it depicts one woman's descent into insanity; but also for the power of its testimony to the importance of freedom and self-empowerment for women.

Boa's new study of Kafka relates gender to other facets of identity. She shows how Kafka, while exploiting such stereotypes as the New Woman, the Magna Mater, the Whore, and the assimilating Jew for literary raw material, undermined these stereotypes and rejected patriarchal attitudes of his period. Boa places Kafka's alienating images of the male body and fascinated disgust of female sexuality in context with the militaristic, racist, gender, and class ideologies of the early twentieth century. She draws on Kafka's letters to his fiancee and to the Czech journalist, Milena, to illuminate how he transformed the details of this reactionary world into the strange signs and devices which assure his place in the modernist canon.