Deprived of parental affection as a child, Gilman sank into postpartum depression after her daughter Katharine was born. The famous "nerve specialist" Weir Mitchell had this prescription: "Live as domestic a life as possible … And never touch pen, brush or pencil as long as you live." She disobeyed, separating from her husband and moving to California with Katharine. Though she embarked on a successful career, she was unhappy, and eventually sent Katharine back to live with her father. She may not have been a model for a joyful feminist life, and she's been accused of racism, but Picardie asks that we remember her "as the writer of The Yellow Wallpaper – and the survivor who unlocked the door of the madwoman in the attic, and lived to tell the tale." [Telegraph]

Until fairly recently, just about all the big names in horror, the writers whose stories dominate the anthologies and whose novels stay in print forever, have been of the masculine persuasion: Poe, Le Fanu, Stoker, Lovecraft, M. R. James, King, Straub. Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s remarkable 1892 tale of madness, "The Yellow Wallpaper", manages to creep into the odd collection, as does Shirley Jackson’s story “The Lottery,” which is so disturbing that it induced a significant number of New Yorker readers to cancel their subscriptions when it appeared in the magazine’s pages in 1948. But for the most part, a woman’s place in horror has been pretty well defined: she’s the victim, seen occasionally and heard only when she screams.

Even the few notable exceptions (Gilman, Jackson and Shelley) are set apart from the true purveyors of the occult in that they only “dabble” in the unspeakable, never devoting as much of their time and ink to the supernatural as their male counterparts. Many of the women writing in horror often fall into the “paranormal romance” genre, including the insanely popular Twilight series, where the real aim is not to evoke terror, but to present an impossibly romantic alternative to reality. For many years, horror fiction, like video games and action movies, seemed to be an exclusively masculine sphere, only occasionally broken into by the female voice.

Now, the Times argues, the tide is turning. Women writers are producing some of the most interesting and provocative horror fiction. Authors Sara Gran (Come Closer), Alexandra Sokoloff (The Price), Sarah Langan (The Missing, and The Keeper) and Elizabeth Hand (Generation Loss, and The Bride of Frankenstein: Pandora’s Bride) have received both critical acclaim and awards for their contributions to the genre. With works featuring female protagonists and narrators, these writers are following in the footsteps of Shelley and Shirley Jackson, creating psychologically rich dramas and returning horror fiction to its subtly-creepy roots.

Horror can be powerful medium for feminist works. Monsters, zombies, ghosts, and vampires have been used before in both fiction and film to address social injustice. The end-of-the-world feeling that Elizabeth Hand and Sarah Langan capture seems similar to the terrifying and repressive future depicted in The Handmaid’s Tale. Although some of the novels described by the Times are not overtly feminist, there's a sense that these authors are willing to take risks with subject matter that many male authors shy away from, including sex and sexual violence (Hand’s novel, Generation Loss, is narrated by a former rape victim). In a way, the supernatural seems a fitting setting for a discussion about the real horrors of madness, violence, and death. In The Yellow Wallpaper, Gilman draws upon her own experience with post-partum depression to create a chilling tale of madness and haunting, taking the hysterical-women stereotype and making it into something far more threatening, and thus far more subversive. Through playing with the boundaries of sanity and insanity, real and unreal, Gran, Sokoloft, Hand and Langan have created a new space for women in horror.

Shelley's Daughters [NY Times]

She was a patient likely to improve but never be cured...[she was initially] diagnosed as schizophrenic, and [years later her doctor] would describe her as a 'constitutional, emotionally unbalanced psychopath...in Zelda's case the onset of the illness could have come several years before she was ever hospitalized. Scott, in the fall of 1928, had made a cryptic entry in his ledger: 'Dirt eating in hotel.' (The psychiatric term is 'stool smearing' or 'stool eating.')...presumably no one knew of it but Scott. Whatever he saw was so disturbing that he tried to block it from his mind.

Feminist revisionist literary scholars have resurrected a lot of great writers — Charlotte Perkins Gilman of the The Yellow Wallpaper, Kate Chopin and her Awakening — and I think their time would be better spent unearthing other fantastic female writers from the prior centuries. Zelda's life was interesting and dramatic for sure, but continuing to argue for her artistic prominence is losing battle.

The Art of Being Zelda [BlueStocking — Click on "Current Issue" to find article]
Bobbed Hair and Bathtub Gin: Writers Running Wild in the Twenties [Amazon]