Charlotte Perkins Gilman & John Dewey
Not only is the nature of individual experience one of the most complex processes of beings, but it is also one of the least understood and most controversial when it comes to defining any kind of absolutes regarding it. Many contend there are no such absolutes, included among them John Dewey and Charlotte Perkins Gilman. Like Nietzsche, both Dewey and Gilman would agree there is no such thing as absolute certainty. To Dewey, human experience encompasses psycho-physical and physical-chemical exchanges, but human experience transcends these and represents nature’s highest actualization. Human experience is not apart from nature, it is nature. Experience to Dewey encompasses both active and passion dimensions. Any kind of human involvement, with the self or with the world, is encompassed in human experience. We see a similar theme to Dewey’s in Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s short stories, The Yellow Wallpaper and If I Were A Man. In each of these stories we perceive the nature of men versus women, and even of woman with herself. Like Dewey’s contention that what we seek most of all is fulfillment and unity and satisfaction in experience, we see the narrator in both of Gilman’s stories seeking the same.
Gilman suffered from post-partum hysteria and was treated by a famous doctor of the era, one who prescribed his famous “rest cure”, the same cure the female narrator cannot tolerate and defies in The Yellow Wallpaper. In this story the narrator remains nameless and there is good reason for it. She feels as if she has no identity or control over obtaining fulfillment and unity and satisfaction in life. Her husband is a doctor who also prescribes complete rest for her and is opposed to her doing the one thing that seems to give her a unique voice, writing. Thus, the narrator defies her husband and becomes determine to reclaim herself through analyzing and figuring out the on...