The Yellow Wallpaper

By Charlotte Perkins Gilman

'The Yellow Wallpaper', by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, is a short story first published in January 1892. The psychological thriller by the renowned US women's rights writer and campaigner is an autobiographical-inspired novella based upon her own experience of severe postnatal depression, leading to post-natal psychosis. At the time, women with PND (known in America as postpartum depression) were seen as hysterical and were often dismissed by doctors who overlooked treatment options through lack of understanding of the condition. In Perkins' short story, written tellingly from the first-person perspective, the nameless female protagonist is forced to sleep in an attic with yellow wallpaper and is driven mad by her enforced imprisonment following the birth of her first child. The book describes in detail how she sees imagined beings and ghostly sightings in the house. Disturbing in its nature yet utterly realistic to the heroine, the protagonist offers a diary-style narrative detailing her experience as a new mother suffering with severe mental illness:"I don't know why I should write this.I don't want to.I don't feel able.And I know John would think it absurd. But I must say what I feel and think in some way—it is such a relief!But the effort is getting to be greater than the relief."Evoking gothic themes of Charlotte Bronte's 'Jane Eyre', in both Jane Eyre's own tortuous and notorious Red Room and Bertha Mason's confinement in her loft prison, the book was made into a film in 2011 – directed by Logan Thomas and starring Aric Cushing and Juliet Landau.-

• Language: English
• Publisher: SAGA Egmont
• Release date: Jun 13, 2022
• ISBN: 9788728103708

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.

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Charlotte Perkins Gilman

The Yellow Wallpaper

SAGA Egmont

The Yellow Wallpaper

Cover image: Shutterstock

Copyright © 1890, 2022 SAGA Egmont

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ISBN: 9788728103708

1st ebook edition

Format: EPUB 3.0

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This work is republished as a historical document. It contains contemporary use of language.

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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