The Yellow Wallpaper

Written by Charlotte Perkins Gilman

Narrated by Tony Walker

The story is a double play: is it the story of a woman going mad, or a woman possessed by something evil? We begin to suspect that the narrator’s apparently caring husband John, may not be as caring as she thinks. Is he trying to control her? We know that Charlotte was much concerned with the emancipation of women and them achieving financial independence, so is the character of John an echo of this? The horror in the story revolves around the Yellow Wallpaper and like many of us, she sees to have seen patterns in the abstract wallpaper that eventually evolve into characters. She ultimately can enter the wallpaper and more disturbingly, the woman from the wallpaper can come out into her room. The bizarreness of the crouching, creeping figures serves to unnerve the reader.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Author's Republic
• Release date: Jun 17, 2020
• ISBN: 9781662122392

Charlotte Perkins Gilman

Charlotte Perkins Gilman was an American sociologist, writer, lecturer, and social reformist. As a child, Gilman was often in the presence of her father’s relatives, notably Isabella Beecher Hooker, a well-known suffragist, and Harriet Beecher Stowe, an abolitionist and author of Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Many of Gilman’s own works reflect similarly feminist and social reformist perspectives, and in 1909 she established The Forerunner, a magazine that acted as a forum for discussion of these issues. Gilman’s most famous work is “The Yellow Wallpaper,” a semi-autobiographical short story written in response to being put on “rest cure” by a doctor to cure her depression. Gilman’s works also include the poetry collection In This Our World, and the feminist texts Women and Economics and The Home: Its Work and Influence. She died in 1935.

Reviews for The Yellow Wallpaper

[jamey oneal · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I'm sure it's fine, but I wasn't interested in listening to this story narrated by a man. No offense to the narrator at all, it just felt uncanny, so I switched to a different version.