The Yellow Wallpaper
The Yellow Wallpaper (original title: 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 for its illustration of the attitudes towards mental and physical health of women in the 19th century. It is also lauded as an excellent work of horror fiction.
The story is written as a collection of journal entries narrated in the first person. The journal was written by a woman whose physician husband has rented an old mansion for the summer. Forgoing other rooms in the house, the couple moves into the upstairs nursery. As a form of treatment, the husband forbids the journal writer from working or writing, and encourages her to eat well and get plenty of air so that she can recuperate from what he calls a "temporary nervous depression – a slight hysterical tendency", a common diagnosis in women at the time. As the reader continues through the journal entries, they experience the writer's gradual descent into madness with nothing better to do than observe the peeling yellow wallpaper in her room.
"The Yellow Wallpaper" is sometimes cited as an example of Gothic literature for its themes of madness and powerlessness. Alan Ryan introduced the story by writing: "quite apart from its origins [it] is one of the finest, and strongest, tales of horror ever written. It may be a ghost story. Worse yet, it may not." Pioneering horror author H. P. Lovecraft writes in his essay Supernatural Horror in Literature (1927) that "'The Yellow WallPaper' rises to a classic level in subtly delineating the madness which crawls over a woman dwelling in the hideously papered room where a madwoman was once confined".
Excerpted from The Yellow Wallpaper on Wikipedia.
The Yellow Wallpaper
| Author | Charlotte Perkins Gilman |
| Country | United States |
| Genre | Short stories, Gothic Fiction, Horror Fiction |
| Copyright | Public domain in the United States. |
| Book cover | - |
| Ebooks | Project Gutenberg. |
| Scans | Google-digitized. |
| Audio | Librivox | Internet Archive Reader: Kirsten Ferreri 01 |
| Read online | The Yellow Wallpaper |