Comparison of Giant Wisteria and Yellow Background Charlotte Perkins Gilman's short story, "The Giant Wistaria" was first published in June 1891 in The New England Magazine , the same newspaper that would publish "The Yellow Wallpaper" a year later, in 1892. These were difficult years in Gilman's life: she had separated from her first husband, the artist Charles Walter Stetson, and was trying, unsuccessfully, to resolve her contradictory desires, on the one hand, to be a good wife and mother in conventional terms and, on the other, to be autonomous and seriously dedicated to her work. In 1891-1892, Gilman (still using the name Stetson) experienced his first literary successes, confirming his decision to work politically for women's rights, and moving towards the painful decision to give up custody of his daughter, who, starting by May 1894, he would be raised by Stetson's second wife, whom Gilman considered a "co-mother". Although "The Giant Wistaria" remains largely unknown while "The Yellow Wallpaper" has earned the status of an American classic since its rediscovery by feminist critics in the 1970s, the two texts can easily be considered parallel, as they share many of the same formal and thematic concerns. Both “The Yellow Wallpaper” and “The Giant Wistaria” explore the troubled nexus between the sexual repression of women, the patriarchal control of motherhood, and the madness and anxiety of fatherhood. Both are fragmented in form and depend for their correct interpretation on a community of sympathetic readers implicitly constructed by Gilman as feminist, if not also feminine. “The Giant Wistaria” is a two-part story. The first, set at least a hundred years before the second, concerns the punishment of a young woman by her parents, especially her father, for having given birth to an illegitimate child. The second part takes place in the present, that is, at the end of the 19th century, when a group of young people, Mr. and Mrs. Jenny, their "beautiful sisters" and their sisters' suitors, discover the horrible secret of the house. Gloria A. Biamonte's interpretation of "The Giant Wistaria" implicitly projects the young group as a community of readers and emphasizes that community's divisions by gender. It is the women who are initially convinced that the house must have "a story, if only we could find it", while the men simply mock and tease until the house no longer allows this absent-minded attitude. Furthermore, at the end of the story it becomes clear that women will be the most sensitive and skilled readers in the house, just as it is perhaps also clear that the gothic tale is intended as a warning to themselves..