The Yellow Wallpaper

A little about the story

A woman taken to a country house for rest tries to accept her husband’s confidence that he knows what will help her recover. The room chosen for her is large but unwelcoming, with barred windows and wallpaper whose color and pattern become difficult to ignore. Forbidden the work and stimulation she wants, she begins recording her thoughts privately, measuring the growing difference between the reassuring language around her and the way she actually feels.

Charlotte Perkins Gilman makes that secret account the reader’s only direct access to the experience. Ordinary domestic arrangements become increasingly charged, and the wallpaper’s apparently meaningless design begins to attract the attention that other people refuse to give the narrator’s own explanations. The story is brief, but its pressure builds through restrictions on movement, speech, and imagination. It can be read as psychological Gothic fiction and as a challenge to forms of care that silence the person being cared for, asking what happens when authority dismisses a voice precisely because that voice is struggling to be heard.

Things You May Not Know About The Yellow Wallpaper

• First published in 1892. The story appeared in The New England Magazine, before becoming widely recognized as a major work of feminist and Gothic fiction.
• An earlier author name. Its original publication used Charlotte Perkins Stetson, the surname under which Gilman was then writing.
• Experience informed the critique. Gilman connected the story with her own experience of a restrictive rest cure, while transforming that experience into fiction.
• A secret written account. The narrator hides her writing, making the existence of the narrative itself part of her resistance to the rules imposed on her.
• Gilman later explained her purpose. In the 1913 essay Why I Wrote The Yellow Wallpaper, she discussed the circumstances and concerns behind the story.