The Yellow Wallpaper

About this book

The Yellow Wallpaper is a short story by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, first published in 1892. It is written as the secret journal of a woman confined to an upstairs room for a summer on her physician husband’s orders, and it records, over a few weeks, her growing fixation on the room’s patterned wallpaper. At about six thousand words it is the shortest work in this part of the catalog and among the most frequently anthologized American stories.

The story has lasted because it works on two levels at once. Read as a horror story, it is a steady descent told by a narrator who cannot see what the reader sees. Read as social criticism, it is an indictment of a medical regime that treated women’s distress by removing every outlet for it. Gilman had been through something like the treatment herself and said that she wrote the story to show what it did.

The story

A young wife and new mother is taken by her husband, John, to a rented country house for the summer so that she can recover from what he calls a temporary nervous depression. John is a doctor, and his prescription is rest: no work, no writing, no company, and as little thinking as possible. She is installed in a large upstairs room that was once a nursery, with barred windows and wallpaper in a sprawling, faded yellow pattern.

Forbidden to write, she writes anyway, in secret, and the story is what she sets down. At first the entries are about the house, her husband’s kindness, and her own doubts about the treatment. Then they are increasingly about the wallpaper: its pattern, its smell, the way it seems to move, and what she begins to believe is behind it.

Themes and historical context

Gilman suffered a severe depression after the birth of her daughter in 1885 and was treated by Silas Weir Mitchell, the Philadelphia physician who had developed the “rest cure,” a regimen of isolation, enforced inactivity, and heavy feeding prescribed mainly to women. She later wrote that she followed his instructions for several months, came close to a breakdown, and recovered only when she abandoned them and went back to work. In a 1913 article she said she sent Mitchell a copy of the story.

The story was published in a general-interest magazine and was read at the time mainly as a piece of gothic fiction in the manner of Poe. Its reputation as a feminist text dates from its rediscovery in the 1970s, when it was reprinted and taken up by scholars of women’s writing. Since then it has been read as a study of how authority, even affectionate authority, can silence a person, and of writing as the one activity the narrator refuses to give up.

Gilman went on to a long career as a lecturer and writer on economics and the position of women. The Yellow Wallpaper is the most widely read of her fictions.

Who should read it

It takes well under an hour to read. The journal form means the sentences are short and the paragraphs are often a line or two long, which makes the gradual change in the narrator’s voice easy to follow. There is nothing graphic in it, but the atmosphere is oppressive and the ending is disturbing. It is a good choice for readers who want to sample nineteenth-century American fiction without committing to a novel.