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The Yellow Wallpaper

Charlotte Perkins Gilman

Book Overview: 

Presented in the first person, the story is a collection of journal entries written by a woman whose physician husband has confined her to the upstairs bedroom of a house he has rented for the summer. She is forbidden from working and has to hide her journal from him, so she can recuperate from what he calls a "temporary nervous depression – a slight hysterical tendency," a diagnosis common to women in that period. The windows of the room are barred, and there is a gate across the top of the stairs, allowing her husband to control her access to the rest of the house.

The story depicts the effect of confinement on the narrator's mental health and her descent into psychosis. With nothing to stimulate her, she becomes obsessed by the pattern and color of the wallpaper. "It is the strangest yellow, that wall-paper! It makes me think of all the yellow things I ever saw – not beautiful ones like buttercups, but old foul, bad yellow things. But there is something else about that paper – the smell! ... The only thing I can think of that it is like is the color of the paper! A yellow smell."

Recommended for fans of Stephen King, James Herbert, and Clive Barker.

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Book Excerpt: 
. . .ed enough to constantly irritate and provoke study, and when you follow the lame uncertain curves for a little distance they suddenly commit suicide—plunge off at outrageous angles, destroy themselves in unheard of contradictions.

The color is repellent, almost revolting; a smouldering unclean yellow, strangely faded by the slow-turning sunlight.

It is a dull yet lurid orange in some places, a sickly sulphur tint in others.

No wonder the children hated it! I should hate it myself if I had to live in this room long.

There comes John, and I must put this away,—he hates to have me write a word.

We have been here two weeks, and I haven't felt like writing before, since that first day.

I am sitting by the window now, up in this atrocious nursery, and there is nothing to hinder my writing as much as I please, save lack of strength.

John is away all day, and even some nights when his cas. . . Read More

Community Reviews

Delightful.

A collection of short stories by renowned Charlotte Perkins Gilman. She’s good, she’s REALLY good. This may be one of the best collections I’ve ever read. Clearly an exception to the mixed bag rule, nearly all of the stories being good or better, noting “The Good” ones may even feel ex

5/5 stars

The fact that I like to enter into a book blindly is turning out to be fatal for me sometimes for The Yellow Wallpaper scared the crap out of me when I started reading it at 2 am.

The Yellow Wallpaper is the story of John's wife. Yes, you read it right. Her identity in the book is only

The Yellow Wallpaper, first published in 1892, is now a staple of middle and high school English classes and college (Gender and )Women’s Studies programs, linked to Kate Chopin’s The Awakening, Ibsen’s The Doll House and similar texts reflecting on the damage patriarchy does to society, especially

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I haven’t read much classic reads this year, and a few days before the end of 2018, I decided to go for a classic short story, and I chose The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman.

This classic has been written by a woman in the 19th century.

I read The Yellow Wallpaper in my 8th grade Literature class and I was a bit blown away. Parts of this short story have stuck with me since. So, when I spotted this tiny tome for only fifty cents, I had to have it.

The title story was every bit as eerie-creepy-quirky as I remember, but I had missed t

Roland Barthes talked about 'writerly' and 'readerly' books. I've struggled for a long time, myself, in trying to come up for terms to talk about the differences between deliberate works and those which are too bumbling, too one-sided, or too ill-informed to make the reader think.

While The Yellow W

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