ABSTRACT
The relationship of Henry James and Charlotte Perkins Gilman to one another can at best be described as complementary. James deliberately cultivates ambiguity and “adumbration,” as he calls it, while Gilman wants her feminist critique to emerge clearly from her fiction. This chapter argues that Gilman’s point in “The Yellow Wall-Paper” comes across quite clearly and that most readers would easily understand the critique leveled at John Carlos Rowe’s attitude and behavior. After “The Yellow Wall-Paper,” Gilman wrote a series of short stories imitating the style of several major living authors, including James. The result of the James pastiche, “One Way Out”, is a revealing imaginative encounter between these otherwise remote figures. Gilman’s short story à la James serves as a concise and suggestive illustration both of the common concerns and the important differences between the contemporaneous writers.
