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    The Yellow Wallpaper
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    The Yellow Wallpaper
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    The Yellow Wallpaper
    Ebook24 pages32 minutes

    The Yellow Wallpaper

    By Charlotte Perkins Gilman

    4.5/5

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    About this ebook

    The Yellow Wallpaper is regarded as an important early work of American feminist literature, illustrating attitudes in the 19th century toward women's physical and mental health.


    The story is written in the first person as a series of journal entries. The narrator is a woman whose husband — a physician — has confined her to the upstairs bedroom of a house he has rented for the summer. She is forbidden from working and has to hide her journal entries from him so that she can recuperate from what he has diagnosed as a "temporary nervous depression — a slight hysterical tendency;" a diagnosis common to women in that period. The windows of the room are barred, and there is a gate across the top of the stairs, allowing her husband to control her access to the rest of the house.


    The story illustrates the effect of confinement on the narrator's mental health, and her descent into psychosis. With nothing to stimulate her, she becomes obsessed by the pattern and color of the room's wallpaper.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherSheba Blake Publishing
    Release dateJun 29, 2015
    ISBN9781329573062
    Author

    Charlotte Perkins Gilman

    Charlotte Perkins Gilman was an American sociologist, writer, lecturer, and social reformist. As a child, Gilman was often in the presence of her father’s relatives, notably Isabella Beecher Hooker, a well-known suffragist, and Harriet Beecher Stowe, an abolitionist and author of Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Many of Gilman’s own works reflect similarly feminist and social reformist perspectives, and in 1909 she established The Forerunner, a magazine that acted as a forum for discussion of these issues. Gilman’s most famous work is “The Yellow Wallpaper,” a semi-autobiographical short story written in response to being put on “rest cure” by a doctor to cure her depression. Gilman’s works also include the poetry collection In This Our World, and the feminist texts Women and Economics and The Home: Its Work and Influence. She died in 1935.

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    Reviews for The Yellow Wallpaper

    4.5/5

    23 ratings23 reviews

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    • 4/5
      Interesting....and yet super weird at the same time. The woman is obviously manic depressive.
    • 4/5
      Originally published in 1899, the slight, 30-odd page story is one of the creepiest glimpses into the process of a mental breakdown I have ever read. Republished by The Feminist Press in 1973, the afterword of the edition I read spoke of the author’s prolific career as a writer, poet, publisher, and academic. She wrote several textbooks, opened her own school, and for several years of her life wrote, published, and edited her own magazine, which amounted to about 21,000 words per month. (Hedges, Afterword to the 1973 Feminist Press edition, 38.) In other words, Gilman was a total badass. However, the short story captures the prisoner-like aspects of the submissive role that many women lived at the time of publication, both in terms of marriage and societal expectations overall. The protagonist of the story is left in a room, with little to no social contact and no medical treatment. As the story progresses her mental condition worsens and those around her coddle her but do nothing proactive to alleviate her situation. It is scary, realistic, and her lack of choices and the guilt she is made to feel are heart-wrenching. Gilman's writing draws you right into the story and right down the slide of sanity in a way I will never forget. I absolutely recommend this work to anyone who enjoys short stories, people who like to read about mental illness, and anyone interested in 19th century feminism.
    • 5/5
      On the surface, it's a creepy, intriguing story about a woman and the wallpaper in her room, but it goes so much deeper to address how women were treated by their husbands and by doctors at the time. It's partially autobiographical and appalling and groundbreaking, especially for 1892, yet not as unrecognizable as one would hope for being well over 100 years old, which added to the disturbance level of this story for me.

      It's in the public domain and a really quick read, but I liked this edition for its introduction and afterword that set the historical context and gave a lot of information about Charlotte Perkins Gilman and her own experiences with the "rest cure." But the afterword does spoil "The Awakening" and "The House of Mirth," just FYI.
    • 5/5
      Excitingly creepy in every way.
    • 4/5
      A short story chronicling one woman's descent into madness, poorly understood by those around her, and tormented by the ghastly yellow wallpaper in her bedroom. Very well told. I only wish it were longer.
    • 5/5
      The Yellow Wallpaper is a dark and powerfully written tale, first published in 1892, about a woman's descent into madness. Her psychosis is brought on by the social restrictions of the time, a controlling husband and the deteriorating yellow wallpaper that covers their bedroom.
    • 4/5
      This is an interesting short story about the psychological disintegration of a woman, seeing images in the eponymous object around her as she lays in her sickbed. Too short to exert a really powerful impact, though, for me. 3.5/5
    • 5/5
      This is a classic of feminist literature. It tells of a woman suffering from depression which is made worse and worse by the paternalistic care of her "loving" husband who treats her as a child, manages every aspect of her life, discourages her writing career, and dismisses any concern she might have. His idea of a cure for depression seems to be that she sleep for 3 months and not trouble her pretty little brain. The result is a very moving, very creepy story.
    • 4/5
      A gradual descent into madness, as ‘journaled’ by a Victorian lady. Semi-autobiographical, and subtly written, this depression settling into something darker delivers chills along with the story.
    • 4/5
      This short story is one that took me a short time to read, but inspired days of thought. It's a wonderfully written way to dive into the complex issues of the way society viewed/views mental illness, particularly the way the medical profession views mental illness, and the consequences. Also inspiring me to think about the subtle mistreatment of women in this era, it was really one of the most thought-provoking works I've read despite the short length.
    • 5/5
      One of my favorite pieces of short fiction ever. I was first exposed to this story during my senior year of high school, where I just wrote it off as a creepy story. I enjoyed it, but I didn't really GET it. This 6,000 word story, written as a journal of a woman's descent into madness, is deceptively simple.I came across it again years later, and I saw it in a different way. An extremely personal way. I related to this narrator in that I feared ending up like her. And if I'd been born in her time, I very well might have. I chose this story to be the focus of a research paper for a lit class, and studied it once again for another lit class. I am very familiar with this story and I've lost count of how many times I've read it. But every time I read it, I get a new feeling from it, and it chills me all over again.
    • 4/5
      This is my favorite short story. It's a good look at the repression of women, the mistreatment of women by society and the medical profession, and sexual oppression. It's an interesting representation of how post-partum depression was completely ignored in the past. It's a creepy, short story about a depressed woman's descent into madness after her husband locks her away in an old nursery (windows barred, door locked). Very chilling read.
    • 4/5
      A journalized descent into a woman's madness . . . brought on yellow wallpaper.A quick, rather creepy sort of read.
    • 3/5
      The Yellow Wallpaper is a short story written by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, first published in January 1892 in The New England Magazine can be found on the internet and read in about thirty minutes. It is considered an example of early feminist literature. The protagonist, a woman married to a physician who may have just had a baby is being kept in a home to rest because she is suffering from nervous hysteria. She is being kept in a room with a yellow wallpaper. The reader is given a picture of her descent into madness. At first the pattern is just annoying and irritating but then it becomes sinister. The woman wants to write but is forbidden by her husband so she is writing in her journal secretly. She wants to visit with lively friends but he husband tells her it will be too much for her. In the end she is more paranoid and no longer feels safe leaving the room.
    • 5/5
      First published in 1892, The Yellow Wallpaper is a short story of choppy sentences that punctuate the rambling thoughts of a woman going mad. The narrator is an obedient wife and mother, sexually restrained and socially isolated. Her husband and brother, both physicians, confine her to an attic nursery in order to calm her nerves. Instead, she is tormented by a woman trapped inside the wallpaper “where the pattern lolls like a broken neck and two bulbous eyes stare at you upside down.”
    • 5/5
      I think that The Yellow Wallpaper is a really good short story. The way that the plot unravels on it's way to the ending is really skillful. I'm also impressed by the fact that the author went through a similar situation and was able to find her way out of it! Knowing that the author wrote from experience added a lot of credibility to the story as a whole.
    • 5/5
      Short and über creepy, this story is told from the point-of-view of a woman staying in the country with her husband. She’s recovering from an unnamed illness (possibly post-partum depression) and her husband has set her up in a room by herself. The walls are covered with an ugly yellow wallpaper and as the story progresses she becomes obsessed with it. She begins to believe she can see a woman lurking behind the designs in the wallpaper. The longer she remains confined to the room the deeper she descends into her madness, taking the reader along for the ride. The story was published in 1892 and is often called one of the first pieces of feminist literature. It’s a chilling look at the “treatment” women were often given and the lack of freedom they were permitted in these situations. It’s also just a great scary story, so there’s something for everyone.
    • 5/5
      Summary: While vacationing at a summer home in rural England to recover from depression and hystericism, the main character becomes obsessed with the wallpaper her room is papered with and descends into madness.Use and appropriateness in a HS classroom: This honestly was the first piece of literature I can remember that made me really think analytically about what the author actually meant by the story. Its length makes the story very accessible to students who haven’t had to analyze much (or at all) before and the topic is so unusual it creates a need to find out exactly why this seemingly innocuous wallpaper is so interesting and maddening. Overall, it’s a shocking but extremely effective short story that can be read and analyzed within one or two class periods. It’s most appropriate for 11th or 12th graders depending on their reading and comprehension levels.
    • 4/5
      I am glad I read this during the day. It is quite frightening on a lot of levels. The narrator is struggling with depression stemming from the pressure of being a ‘good wife’ by society’s standards and possibly also from the recent birth of her child. As I’m sure was common at the time, she is assumed to have some sort of non-medical exhaustion by her doctor husband and brother. The cure is extended rest and absolutely no work whatsoever. Trapped in a room (of her husband’s choosing of course), she descends into a sort of madness through obsession with the wallpaper. There is a lot going on in the short story, most disturbing to me is the narrators seeming ignorance of the cause of her own depression. While she does fight in a way against her husband’s diagnosis, she doesn’t seem to feel sure about her condition herself.
    • 5/5
      ** spoiler alert ** This is a fantastic insight into the mind of someone who has been suffering from undiagnosed post-partum depression. Her husband believes she just needs rest and confines her to a room with yellow wallpaper. The result of this isolation is a mental breakdown.
    • 5/5
      Very moving story about a woman who slowly loses her mind because of the way society treats women during the 19th century.
    • 4/5
      A very quick read. The VMC edition I had included an Afterword which was almost as long as the book itself!I enjoyed this book (short story, or at most a novella). Written by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, an early feminist, it recounts a wife's descent into madness. The main character is the wife mentioned above; it is told in the first person, and the reader is not entirely convinced of what is real and what is in the narrator's mind.This was a disturbing book - I felt helpless, like the narrator. A good book.
    • 4/5
      I feel like a cheater for counting this as a book; it is more like a short story. The story is only about 30 pages, and the afterword is as long as the story itself. As one of the few feminist pieces from the 19th century, The Yellow Wallpaper is a chilling psychological account of what both physical and mental isolation and imprisonment could do to a woman. The novel describes vividly the power structure and dynamics of the typical husband-wife relationship at that time and how they attribute to female depression and madness. A powerful piece of literature and social commentary.