The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman

 

The Yellow Wallpaper and selected writings by Charlotte Perkins Gilman.

This edition published 15th Jan 2009 by Virago Modern Classics.

The Yellow Wallpaper originally published 1892.

From the cover of the book:

'It is stripped off - the paper - in great patches . . . The colour is repellent . . . In the places where it isn't faded and where the sun is just so - I can see a strange, provoking, formless sort of figure, that seems to skulk about . . . '

Based on the author's own experiences, The Yellow Wallpaper is the chilling tale of a woman driven to the brink of insanity by the 'rest cure' prescribed after the birth of her child.

Isolated in a crumbling colonial mansion, in a room with bars on the windows, the tortuous pattern of the yellow wallpaper winds its way into the recesses of her mind.

Charlotte Perkins Gilman was America's leading feminist intellectual of the early twentieth century. In addition to her masterpiece The Yellow Wallpaper, this edition includes a selection of her best short fiction and extracts from her autobiography.

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The Yellow Wallpaper is a short story about a young woman diagnosed as having a 'nervous condition' after the birth of her child. Her doctor husband prescribes a period of rest for her recuperation (widely known as the rest cure), and rents a dilapidated, once grand country house for three months over the summer, where she languishes in the former nursery at the top of the house while he is frequently absent.

Denied of all intellectual stimulation, including reading or writing, and confined to a shabby room with bars on the windows and a bed fixed to the floor, her thoughts turn inwards. She becomes obsessed with tracing the pattern in the peeling yellow wallpaper, consumed by the idea that there is a malevolent presence trapped behind the overlaid prints, and she falls gradually into madness.

Based on her own experience of being prescribed the 'rest cure' following a bout of what we would now know as post-natal depression, Charlotte Perkins Gilman's most well-known story is widely held to be a feminist masterpiece. 

The story unfurls through the fragmented, first-person journal entries of our unnamed protagonist, which she secretively scribbles when unobserved by her husband and his housekeeper sister, and they set a chill in your heart as you are party to her increasingly fractured sanity. 

Since it was first published in 1892, there has been much debate about how metaphorical Gilman intended her story to be in terms of feminist themes, but there is no doubt that it stands as a convincing argument against the ridiculous treatments prescribed for women dismissed as 'hysterical' at the time it was written - and it is an incredibly vivid, deeply unsettling, example of Gothic literature, that thrums with themes of madness, patriarchal control, and female rage.

Whatever the hidden meanings, I think it is enough to know that this story had considerable impact on views about the 'rest cure', which is after all, why she wrote it. She even sent a copy to Dr Silas Weir Mitchell, the pioneer of the 'rest cure' - and the very man who nearly sent her spiralling into madness when he recommended this treatment... his response is sadly unrecorded.

This is a story I have been meaning to read for a long time, and I am glad to have finally got around to it with the #QuietClassics2024 gang. 

The Yellow Wallpaper is available to buy now in various formats.

About the author:

Charlotte Perkins Gilman; also Charlotte Perkins Stetson, was a prominent American feminist, sociologist, novelist, writer of short stories, poetry, and nonfiction, and a lecturer for social reform.