Charlotte Perkins Gilman's most famous work brings the reader into the mind of a woman on the rest cure. With the male figures in her life as her captors, the narrator is forced into a room with nothing to do but think. What's surprising about Gilman's story is the fact that it was so widely celebrated when it was a clear form of resistence against the forms of control over the female body in the late 19th century. Was it simply cognitive dissonance where her audience could believe the story to be entirely fiction, or did her writing stand in to support women who could not share their voices?
Chopin, another celebrated female writer from the late 19th century, writes in an unpublished poem about the "ecstacy of madness." She takes something used to oppress women, in this case: madness, and celebrates the freedom of it. Although this is not a well-known work, Chopin frequently used her status as a writer to speak about the oppression of women. This particular poem calls attention to the ways in which Chopin was celebrated for her acts of resistence to the dominant culture.
