Description

The Yellow Wallpaper is a 6,000-word short story by the Americanwriter Charlotte Perkins Gilman, first published in January 1892 inThe New England Magazine. The Yellow Wallpaper is regarded as animportant early work of American feminist literature, illustratingattitudes in the 19th century toward women's physical and mentalhealth. Presented in the first person, The Yellow Wallpaper is acollection of journal entries written by a woman (Jane) whosephysician husband (John) has confined her to the upstairs bedroomof a house he has rented for the summer. She is forbidden fromworking and has to hide her journal from him, so she can recuperatefrom what he calls a "temporary nervous depression – a slighthysterical tendency," a diagnosis common to women in thatperiod.[2] The windows of the room are barred, and there is a gateacross the top of the stairs, allowing her husband to control heraccess to the rest of the house. The story depicts the effect ofconfinement on the narrator's mental health and her descent intopsychosis. With nothing to stimulate her, she becomes obsessed bythe pattern and color of the wallpaper. "It is the strangestyellow, that wall-paper! It makes me think of all the yellow thingsI ever saw – not beautiful ones like buttercups, but old foul, badyellow things. But there is something else about that paper – thesmell! ... The only thing I can think of that it is like is thecolor of the paper! A yellow smell." In the end, she imagines thereare women creeping around behind the patterns of the wallpaper andcomes to believe she is one of them. She locks herself in the room,now the only place she feels safe, refusing to leave when thesummer rental is up. "For outside you have to creep on the ground,and everything is green instead of yellow. But here I can creepsmoothly on the floor, and my shoulder just fits in that longsmooch around the wall, so I cannot lose my way."