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    The Yellow Wallpaper: Bestsellers and famous Books
    The Yellow Wallpaper: Bestsellers and famous Books
    The Yellow Wallpaper: Bestsellers and famous Books
    Ebook31 pages22 minutes

    The Yellow Wallpaper: Bestsellers and famous Books

    By Charlotte Perkins Gilman

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    About this ebook

    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."
    LanguageEnglish
    Publisheranboco
    Release dateNov 1, 2016
    ISBN9783736418295
    The Yellow Wallpaper: Bestsellers and famous Books
    Author

    Charlotte Perkins Gilman

    Charlotte Perkins Gilman was born in 1860 in Connecticut. Her father left when she was young and Gilman spent the rest of her childhood in poverty. As an adult she took classes at the Rhode Island School of Design and supported herself financially as a tutor, painter and artist. She had a short marriage with an artist and suffered serious postnatal depression after the birth of their daughter. In 1888 Gilman moved to California, where she became involved in feminist organizations. In California, she was inspired to write and she published The Yellow Wallpaper in The New England Magazine in 1892. In later life she was diagnosed with breast cancer and died by suicide in 1935.

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      Book preview

      The Yellow Wallpaper - Charlotte Perkins Gilman

      End

      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

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