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    The Yellow Wallpaper
    The Yellow Wallpaper
    The Yellow Wallpaper
    Ebook29 pages26 minutes

    The Yellow Wallpaper

    By Charlotte Perkins Gilman

    4/5

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    About this ebook

    Through a series of journal entries, a woman records her thoughts and feelings over the course of a summer, shortly after giving birth to her child. Confined to her bedroom on the advice of her husband, a physician, “The Yellow Wallpaper” chronicles the woman’s increasing instability, as she becomes obsessed with the yellow wallpaper covering the walls of her room.

    “The Yellow Wallpaper” is considered one of the earliest American feminist works of fiction and is unique for author Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s deft handling of the delicate subject of contemporary attitudes about women’s bodies, emotions, and mental health. The story is considered to be semi-autobiographical, and is based on Gilman’s own experiences with postpartum depression and rest cures.

    HarperCollins brings great works of literature to life in digital format, upholding the highest standards in ebook production and celebrating reading in all its forms. Look for more titles in the HarperCollins short-stories collection to build your digital library.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHarperCollins
    Release dateJul 16, 2013
    ISBN9781443427012
    Author

    Charlotte Perkins Gilman

    Charlotte Perkins Gilman was born in 1860 in Connecticut. Her father left when she was young and Gilman spent the rest of her childhood in poverty. As an adult she took classes at the Rhode Island School of Design and supported herself financially as a tutor, painter and artist. She had a short marriage with an artist and suffered serious postnatal depression after the birth of their daughter. In 1888 Gilman moved to California, where she became involved in feminist organizations. In California, she was inspired to write and she published The Yellow Wallpaper in The New England Magazine in 1892. In later life she was diagnosed with breast cancer and died by suicide in 1935.

    Read more from Charlotte Perkins Gilman

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    Reviews for The Yellow Wallpaper

    4/5

    1,290 ratings77 reviews

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    • 4/5
      A creepy psychological horror with subtle feminism undertones. I truly enjoyed this one, because it showed how helpless women of the past were in certain situations, governed by their fathers, husbands, and brothers.
    • 3/5
      Read this short story in 1 sitting. It is the story of a woman's descent into madness following the birth of her child and the subsequent enforced rest. She is taken to a country house to recover and spends most of her time confined to a room with horrid yellow wallpaper. The description of the room makes me think what happens to the woman has happened in the past. A creepy, thought provoking read.
    • 4/5
      A woman and her husband and young child rent a house for a few months while their house is being renovated. They stay in an attic bedroom with confusingly-patterned yellow wallpaper. The woman, already dealing with mental health problems, slowly becomes delusional due to her husband keeping her in the room with nothing to do but stare at the wallpaper every day.I was expecting this story to speak to me much more than it actually did. I know what the generally accepted interpretation of this story is - the woman's husband is controlling and abusive and she projects that feeling on to the wallpaper as she goes crazy. However, if the reader is seeing things only from the woman's perspective, and the woman is definitely delusional by the end, and thus an unreliable narrator, who are we to say when exactly she turned delusional? I'm certainly among the first to point out when a man is too controlling of a woman, but I think if the woman was delusional and paranoid from before the narration begins this story would look exactly the same.The downside of listening to this story as an audiobook is that I had no sense of time passing. There were no dates or noticeable breaks in the narration, so one minute they are moving into the house for 3 months and the next minute they are a couple days from moving back home. The lack of sense of time might have had something to do with my interpretation. I did listen to it twice but that did not seem to help.
    • 5/5
      The Yellow Wall-Paper was one of the first short novels that I read. I made the exception because of its status on the list of 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die. I am glad that I read it. It is the perfect length for a cup of tea and the price is right. It is a part of Project Gutenberg, and an eBook can be obtained free of charge.
      The story is a series of journal entries told in first person by the narrator, a nameless woman who is locked in a room, after being diagnosed as ‘nervously depressed’ by her physician husband, John. I believe that John acts out of love, although questionable at times. His treatment of his wife is so oppressive, that it seems that the woman may have created her own sense of freedom, although it is seen as psychotic.
      The journal entries describe the woman’s descent into psychosis with the wallpaper in the room where she is locked in her own thoughts. The ending of the story has an odd, but feminist triumph of sorts. I can see that there are many ways that this story, albeit short, could be interpreted. The bottom line is that there is a lot of punch in this short little ditty.
    • 5/5
      Amazing, painful, frightening. TV Tropes even refers to this short story from 1892... (especially in the "Room Full of Crazy" trope...)
    • 5/5
      With still so many unresolved questions, The Yellow Wallpaper keeps its power.Was the doctor husband totally without bad intentions?If no, why did he not respond to his wife's simple request NOT to stay in the upstairs nursery with the awful peeling wallpaper?Did her writing actually cause her to become more upset? or was this a thing he just wanted to control?If she could make it outside for daily walks, why does she keep insisting that her husband would not allow her to DO anything?She could have gardened! fed birds! found a pet! followed the wildlife! dug a pond!So this descent into madness felt more like the choices of an unstable mind rather than an intent by her husband and his sister to drive her insane.
    • 5/5
      I had picked this book up on a whim, largely due to how slim it was, but also because the little synopsis on the back of the book sounded interesting. Before I could start it, someone posted something on Facebook about how they'd read this book ages ago, and it had always stayed with them. I thought, "Huh. And I've never even heard of it...."
      I read it in one sitting, less than an hour's time. For me, that's VERY fast. I can see, now, why they said it always stayed with them. I don't know that I would have appreciated it if I'd read this when I was in my teens or twenties, or even in my thirties.... but at this exact point in my life, it DEFINITELY spoke to me!!!
      Another one I'll re-read again and again!!!
    • 3/5
      This was a short story told from the point of view of a woman who was suffering what we would today call postpartum depression. Her husband and family force her to stay on bed rest in a strange room where she slowly loses her mind based on her surroundings - especially the wallpaper in the room. While short, the story does a nice job making the reader feel for the main character, and gives us a glimpse of what it might be like to suffer from that type of depression.
    • 5/5
      Wow! How is it I've never run across this before? Gilman's writing and characterization is superb. This is definitely one to go back to again and again.
    • 4/5
      In The Yellow Wallpaper, Charlotte Perkins Gilman explores the rest cure through a story in which her unreliable narrator slowly unravels like the wallpaper on which she fixates. The tale begins with the narrator entering a gothic manse fallen on hard times as part of her physician husband John's prescription, "absolutely forbidden to 'work' until" she is well (pg. 3). Locked in a room with only the curling patterns on yellow wallpaper to occupy herself, she slowly begins imagining that they move and ascribing personalities to the patterns. The narrator looks out the window and offers insight into her life, but this fades as the wallpaper comes to dominate her world, until she must climb inside it. The story offers useful historical insight into the rest cure while also serving as a good example of nineteenth century gothic fiction.
    • 4/5
      Wow, this is a great short story. Creepy, sinister and unbearably sad.
    • 4/5
      It's fascinating and also mystifying how people handled mental stress, or mental disorders years ago, what things helped some people, and drove others further into madness. From what I understand, this story is partially true, based on the author's experience and hallucinations, and the frustration from people who largely had good intentions. Of course, from a feminist point of view, it's terrible how little people listened to what she wanted, or worked to truly understand and help.
    • 4/5
      It starts so simply...a couple is on vacation. She is ill and taking a rest in the country. But is that true? She is scared, and trapped, and not allowed to leave. Her fear is palpable. Or, maybe, she is an extremely unreliable narrator?
    • 5/5
      This was shorter than I expected.. But interesting.. I loved the visuals I got from her description of the creeping woman behind the pattern in the wallpaper... And to learn ultimately that it was herself she saw trapped behind it.. Creepy.. And sad.. I enjoyed it!
    • 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
      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
      ... how do I even review something like this.

      First of all, it's a masterpiece.

      Secondly, it chilled me to my core.

      Charlotte Perkins-Gilman wrote a feminist psychological thriller and horror story. Perhaps one of the first. And one of the greatest.

      The thing that I admire about this story is that it was able to terrify me on two levels. It has layers of social implications and it's very complex.

      I'll have to read it again some day, when it doesn't terrify me so much.

      I don't think I can say with any conviction, how much this book affected me, but it'll stay with me for the rest of my life.
    • 5/5
      This edition has a version "translated" into modern English, as well as the original in an appendix. There are also two scholarly essays, and some additional statements from the author about the women's right to vote and why she wrote The Yellow Wallpaper.
    • 4/5
      I have been meaning to read this for such a long time and I finally did and it leaves me wishing I could read it again for the first time again, I really enjoyed this one
    • 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
      A woman, confined to an upper-story bedroom in a creepy house for a "rest cure" following a mental breakdown, becomes obsessed with the hideous yellow wallpaper.I have read this story a few times and I always forget how creepy and chilling it is, especially the final image. Gilman has a knack of pointing out the horrific things that society does to women. In this story, depriving the narrator of her means of expressing herself and stimulating her brain is just as terrifying as confining her to her room. I believe the narrator was suffering from undiagnosed postpartum depression.Reread in 2015.
    • 4/5
      Brilliant story of madness! Fascinating piece for its historical value as Ms. Gilman is protesting the common treatment at the time the story was written given to women who were suffering "nervous" disorders. A cautionary tale but extremely frightening because of its reality.
    • 5/5
      I doubt I will ever read again such powerful descriptions of wallpaper. What vivid writing!
    • 4/5
      Interesting story told in journal fashion of a woman compelled to take a rest cure by her p hysician hu s band and the result forced inactivity has on her mind.
    • 3/5
      Never read this as a kid, realized I probably should. An interesting perspective on interior decorating.
    • 3/5
      Interesting read from a different era. Not sure how I really feel even after 2 months. I like dark and books about insanity but this one was a bit out there.
    • 4/5
      Although this is a short story it is very powerful. You pick up on the slow deterioration of the main character, but like with the wallpaper it isn't that clear in the beginning.

      What the attic room has been used for in the past is also up for discussion. I personally believe that although it might once have been used as nursery its previous function might be totally different.
    • 3/5
      This story was difficult for me to decide how I felt on it. I tend to not get very in-depth about what books my symbolize. From what I've read by reviewers and internet sleuthing, this book is rife with symbolism. Since that's not my area of expertise, I will not be basing my review on it.

      The story is very short but very telling. By the end of it, I was almost cheering on her insanity as it was when she seemed the happiest. I was enthralled by her stories of the woman in the wallpaper and there is a part of me that wished it was a bit longer -- more of a beginning and more of an end.

      I don't feel as if I wasted my time on the story and would recommend it to people but I can't say I was swept up in the hype around it. Perhaps, because of my lack of knowledge surrounding symbolism..
    • 4/5
      What a wonderfully creepy short story (novella?)! I had plenty of suspicions about what was going to happen, but wasn't even close...
    • 5/5
      One of my favorite short stories of all time! Beautifully haunting psychological thriller!

    Book preview

    The Yellow Wallpaper - Charlotte Perkins Gilman

    The Yellow Wallpaper

    It is very seldom that mere ordinary people like John and myself secure ancestral halls for the summer.

    A colonial mansion, a hereditary estate, I would say a haunted house, and reach the height of romantic felicity—but that would be asking too much of fate!

    Still I will proudly declare that there is something queer about it.

    Else, why should it be let so cheaply? And why have stood so long untenanted?

    John laughs at me, of course, but one expects that in marriage.

    John is practical in the extreme. He has no patience with faith, an intense horror of superstition, and he scoffs openly at any talk of things not to be felt and seen and put down in figures.

    John is a physician, and perhaps—(I would not say it to a living soul, of course, but this is dead paper and a great relief to my mind)—perhaps that is one reason I do not get well faster.

    You see he does not believe I am sick!

    And what can one do?

    If a physician of high standing, and one’s own husband, assures friends and relatives that there is really nothing the matter with one but temporary nervous depression—a slight hysterical tendency—what is one to do?

    My brother is also a physician, and also of high standing, and he says the same thing.

    So I take phosphates or phosphites—whichever it is, and tonics, and journeys, and air, and exercise, and am absolutely forbidden to work until I am well again.

    Personally, I disagree with their ideas.

    Personally, I believe that congenial work, with excitement and change, would do me good.

    But what is one to do?

    I did write for a while in spite of them; but it does exhaust me a good deal—having to be so sly about it, or else meet with heavy opposition.

    I sometimes fancy that in my condition if I

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