The Yellow Wallpaper
Charlotte Perkins Gilman 1892
This short story takes the form of a woman's secret journal during a prescribed rest cure. Confined to an upstairs room, she begins to see a woman trapped behind its yellow wallpaper.
24 pages 28 min reading time
- A founding work of feminist fiction and one of the most widely read American short stories.
- Argues that treating a woman as fragile and forbidding her to work or write can make her illness worse, not better.
- Shows a mind slowly breaking down from the inside, told by a narrator whose view of events becomes less and less trustworthy.
- Became a key text of the women's movement of the 1970s, and it is now widely taught in schools and colleges as an early story about women's mental health and freedom.
- Helped shape later writing about women driven to the edge by the roles forced on them, a theme that runs through many feminist novels and studies.
Based on her own breakdown
Gilman drew on her own rest cure in 1887, when a doctor told her to never write again.
Sent to her doctor
She mailed a copy to S. Weir Mitchell, the famous doctor whose rest cure she had suffered under.
Rejected as too upsetting
The Atlantic Monthly turned it down, its editor writing that he could not forgive himself for making readers miserable.
Read as a ghost story
Early readers mostly saw it as a horror tale, until feminist publishers revived it in 1973.