The Yellow Wall-Paper
She has just given birth to their child. He labels her postpartum depression as »hysteria.« He rents the attic in an old country house. Here, she is to rest alone – forbidden to leave her room. Instead of improving, she starts hallucinating, imagining herself crawling with other women behind the room's yellow wallpaper. And secretly, she records her experiences. The Yellow Wall-Paper [1892] is the short but intense, Gothic horror story, written as a diary, about a woman in an attic – imprisoned in her gender; by the story. Charlotte Perkins Gilman's feminist novella was long overlooked in American literary history. Nowadays, it is counted among the classics. CHARLOTTE PERKINS GILMAN (1860–1935), born in Hartford, Connecticut, was an American feminist theorist, sociologist, novelist, short story writer, poet, and playwright. Her writings are precursors to many later feminist theories. With her radical life attitude, Perkins Gilman has been an inspiration for many generations of feminists in the USA. Her most famous work is the short story The Yellow Wall-Paper [1892], written when she suffered from postpartum psychosis.
The Yellow Wallpaper Illustrated
"The Yellow Wallpaper" is a short story by American writer Charlotte Perkins Gilman, first published in January 1892 in The New England Magazine.
The Yellow Wallpaper Illustrated
The story details the descent of a young woman into madness. Her supportive, though misunderstanding husband, John, believes it is in her best interests to go on a rest cure after experiencing symptoms of "temporary nervous depression". The family spends the summer at a colonial mansion that has, in the narrator's words, "something queer about it". She and her husband move into an upstairs room that she assumes was once a nursery. Her husband chooses for them to sleep there due to its multitude of windows, which provide the air so needed in her recovery. In addition to the couple, John's sister Jennie is present; she serves as their housekeeper. 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. Ultimately, though, readers are left unsure as to the source of the room's state, leading them to see the ambiguities in the unreliability of the narrator.The narrator devotes many journal entries to describing the wallpaper in the room - its "yellow" smell, its "breakneck" pattern, the missing patches, and the way it leaves yellow smears on the skin and clothing of anyone who touches it. She describes how the longer one stays in the bedroom, the more the wallpaper appears to mutate, especially in the moonlight. With no stimulus other than the wallpaper, the pattern and designs become increasingly intriguing to the narrator. She soon begins to see a figure in the design, and eventually comes to believe that a woman is creeping on all fours behind the pattern. Believing she must try to free the woman in the wallpaper, the woman begins to strip the remaining paper off the wall.After many moments of tension between John and his sister, the story climaxes with the final day in the house. On the last day of summer, she locks herself in her room to strip the remains of the wallpaper. When John arrives home, she refuses to unlock the door. When he returns with the key, he finds her creeping around the room, circling the walls and touching the wallpaper. She excitedly exclaims, "I've got out at last... in spite of you and Jane", causing her husband to faint as she continues to circle the room, creeping over his inert body each time she passes it, believing herself to have become the personification of the woman trapped behind the yellow wallpaper.
The Yellow Wallpaper and Other Stories
In the Longsellers collection, you will find the most read and loved books of all time.Published in 1892, The Yellow Wallpaper, became a classic whenever we talk about feminist literature.The story, told in the format of a diary, tells the story of a woman confined to a room in a country house, under the pretext of treating a condition of "depression and hysteria. Lonely and having her life closely controlled by her husband, she begins to obsess over the wallpaper in her room.Charlotte Perkins Gilman is regarded as pioneer in American feminism. Also known for the utopian feminist novel Herland and its sequel, With Her in Ourland.This book includes 10 short stories by the author, including The Yellow Wallpaper and an essay by the author about her creative process, called "Why I Wrote The Yellow Wallpaper."We hope you'll love this book as much we do, and don't forget to check the rest of the collection for more beloved classics.
Herland, The Yellow Wall-paper, and Selected Writings
Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1860-1935) penned this sardonic remark in her autobiography, encapsulating a lifetime of frustration with the gender-based double standard that prevailed in turn-of-the-century America. With her slyly humorous novel, Herland (1915), she created a fictional utopia where not only is face powder obsolete, but an all-female population has created a peaceful, progressive, environmentally-conscious country from which men have been absent for two thousand years. Gilman was enormously prolific, publishing five hundred poems, two hundred short stories, hundreds of essays, eight novels, and seven years' worth of her monthly magazine, The Forerunner. She emerged as one of the key figures in the women's movement of her day, advocating equality of the sexes, the right of women to work, and socialized child care, among other issues. Today Gilman is perhaps best known for the chilling depiction of a woman's mental breakdown in her unforgettable short story, "The Yellow Wall-Paper". This Penguin Twentieth-Century Classics edition includes both this landmark work and Herland, together with a selection of Gilman's major short stories and her poems.
