The Yellow Wallpaper, by Charlotte Perkins Gilman (Paperback)
Brand : Wildside Press
- SKU:
- 9781479418022
- UPC:
- 9781479418022
“The Yellow Wallpaper” (originally published as “The Yellow Wall-paper. A Story”) is a short story by American writer Charlotte Perkins Gilman, first published in January 1892 in The New England Magazine.It is regarded as an important early work of American feminist literature, illustrating attitudes in the 19th century toward women’s health, both physical and mental.
Presented in the first person, the story is a collection of journal entries written by a woman whose physician husband, John, has rented an old mansion for the summer. Forgoing other rooms in the house, the couple moves into the upstairs nursery. Like most nurseries at the time the windows are barred, the wallpaper has been torn, and the floor is scratched. The narrator attributes all these to children, as most of the damage is isolated to their reach.
As a form of treatment, the unnamed woman is forbidden from working, and is encouraged to eat well and get plenty of exercise and air, so she can recuperate from what he calls a “temporary nervous depression—a slight hysterical tendency,” a diagnosis common to women in that period. As she says, though, the house has “something queer about it.” And so begins her descent into madness.