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About this book
A woman is said to suffer from a slight hysterical tendency after the birth of her daughter. Her husband is a physician, so he decides that they will spend the summer in a colonial mansion for his wife to rest away from the city. She is confined upstairs, and stays in a strange room with an atrocious yellow wallpaper. It seems to move, it smells, and the woman can’t help but grow obsessed with it. She has to free herself from this place, and the madness she’s cursed with. Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s feminist short story is a classic of horror fiction. It depicts the common attitude toward depressed women in the 19th century. Haunting and enticing, this first-person narrative will make you go mad.
Story
The Yellow Wallpaper
By Charlotte Perkins Gilman
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.
I sometimes fancy that in my condition if I had less opposition and more society and stimulus—but John says the very worst thing I can do is to think about my condition, and I confess it always makes me feel bad.
So I...
🎧
Audiobook Available
Listen to The Yellow Wallpaper in the app. It's free and ad-free.
About this book
A woman is said to suffer from a slight hysterical tendency after the birth of her daughter. Her husband is a physician, so he decides that they will spend the summer in a colonial mansion for his wife to rest away from the city. She is confined upstairs, and stays in a strange room with an atrocious yellow wallpaper. It seems to move, it smells, and the woman can’t help but grow obsessed with it. She has to free herself from this place, and the madness she’s cursed with. Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s feminist short story is a classic of horror fiction. It depicts the common attitude toward depressed women in the 19th century. Haunting and enticing, this first-person narrative will make you go mad.
Story
The Yellow Wallpaper
By Charlotte Perkins Gilman
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.
I sometimes fancy that in my condition if I had less opposition and more society and stimulus—but John says the very worst thing I can do is to think about my condition, and I confess it always makes me feel bad.
So I...
