Dewey & Gilman

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

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ns—why, that is something like it. That is, sometimes!” (Gilman 12). Dewey believed that when individuals are robbed of the organic holistic nature of self-education, they are mentally broken to a degree. They are unable to use their own insights, perceptions, i.e., their unique capacities to develop to their fullest because the process by which this occurs is held from them. The narrator in the mentally broken to a degree. They are unable to use their own insights, perceptions, i.e., their unique capacities to develop to their fullest because the process by which this occurs is held from them. The narrator in The Yellow Wallpaper has a husband who wishes she would just sleep and rest and put any kinds of thought from her mind. Of course, she defies him at every step of the way. She pretends she is asleep when she is not, she studies the wallpaper when he is sleeping or away, and she writes, an act he has forbade her, when he is gone. According to Dewey this is the right approach for her to gain her wholeness, her mental balance and strive toward fulfillment, “When the common experience which ought to be the birthright of all human beings is broken by barriers of ignorance, class-prejudice, or economic status, the indiv
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Approximate Word count = 2022
Approximate Pages = 8 (250 words per page)

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