The Yellow Wallpaper - Softcover

Gilman, Charlotte Perkins

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1680920707 ISBN 13: 9781680920703

Publisher: 12th Media Services, 1892

Synopsis

The Yellow Wallpaper (original title: "The Yellow Wall-paper. A Story") is a 6,000-word short story by the American writer Charlotte Perkins Gilman, first published in January 1892 in The New England Magazine. It is regarded as an important early work of American feminist literature, illustrating attitudes in the 19th century toward women's health, both physical and mental.

Presented in the first person, the story is a collection of journal entries written by a woman whose physician husband (John) has rented an old mansion for the summer. Forgoing other rooms in the house, the couple moves into the upstairs nursery. As a form of treatment, the unnamed woman is forbidden from working, and is encouraged to eat well and get plenty of exercise and air, so she can recuperate from what he calls a "temporary nervous depression – a slight hysterical tendency", a diagnosis common to women in that period. She hides her journal from her husband and his sister the housekeeper, fearful of being reproached for overworking herself. The room's windows are barred to prevent children from climbing through them, and there is a gate across the top of the stairs, though she and her husband have access to the rest of the house and its adjoining estate.

The story depicts the effect of understimulation 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."

In the end, she imagines there are women creeping around behind the patterns of the wallpaper and comes to believe she is one of them. She locks herself in the room, now the only place she feels safe, refusing to leave when the summer rental is up. "For outside you have to creep on the ground, and everything is green instead of yellow. But here I can creep smoothly on the floor, and my shoulder just fits in that long smooch around the wall, so I cannot lose my way."

Source: Wikipedia

 

About this title

About the Author:

Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1860-1935) was a prominent American sociologist, novelist, writer of short stories, poetry, and nonfiction, and a lecturer for social reform. She was a utopian feminist during a time when her accomplishments were exceptional for women, and she served as a role model for future generations of feminists because of her unorthodox concepts and lifestyle. Her best remembered work today is her semi-autobiographical short story The Yellow Wallpaper which she wrote after a severe bout of postpartum psychosis.

From AudioFile:

In 1892 an unnamed woman passes the slow days of summer writing down her innermost thoughts while convalescing. Her observations focus on the strange effects of the peeling, fading, yellow wallpaper in her bedroom. The Spencer Library has created a unique audio experience in this chilling tale with profound psychological and moral implications. Claudette Sutherland gives a remarkable performance. Her subtly expressive voice is so skillfully recorded that her soft intakes of breath have a desperate life of their own. The haunting beauty of Carol Nethen's original score can momentarily distract, but it supports more than it interferes, a tribute both to the composer and to the excellence of the recording standards. The listener is rewarded with a fully realized dramatic performance with a strong musical presence. C.T. (c)AudioFile, Portland, Maine

About this edition

• Publisher: 12th Media Services
• Publication date: 1892
• ISBN 10: 1680920707
• ISBN 13: 9781680920703
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 22