This collection of drawings from Gilman's personal collection explore themes of depression, death and motherhood. Although Gilman never officially published these works, her personal drawings offer an insight into her mind that many other, more edited works, cannot. Given that these drawings have no official context, one can read their own interpretations into each one.
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?
Gilman's unpublished poem was written during the final months of her pregnancy with her only child. She cries out to God, asking for him to "help [her] to live" in a "noble and earnest and pure" way. Although this was written before she was subjected to the rest cure, Gilman's poem candidly explores her relationship to depression and mental illness.
