The Yellow Wallpaper
- Downloads
- 100+
- First published
- 1892
- Pages
- 29
About this book
Confined to an upstairs room for a 'rest cure' after childbirth, a young woman forbidden to work or write becomes obsessed with the sickly yellow wallpaper around her, convinced a figure is trapped and creeping behind its pattern. Told through her secret journal, the story charts her chilling descent as enforced idleness and her husband's condescension drive her toward madness. A devastating critique of the way nineteenth-century medicine and marriage silenced women, it is both a masterful psychological horror story and a landmark of feminist literature. Brief, unforgettable, and profoundly disturbing, it has lost none of its power.
From the opening pages
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.
About the author
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Public domain book This work is in the public domain and free of copyright. Anyone may read, download and share it.
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Book facts
- Author
- Charlotte Perkins Gilman
- First published
- 1892
- Reading time
- About 30 minutes
- Pages
- 29
- Language
- English
- Genre
- American Classics
- Formats
- PDF, EPUB, Read online