The Yellow Wallpaper

The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman is a real classic.




You should grab it and read it to experience it yourself.

Here's a simple plot to The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman

The story details an intricate period in the life of a young woman. Her supportive, though misunderstanding husband, John, believes it is in her best interests to go on a rest cure after experiencing symptoms of "temporary nervous depression" after the birth of their baby. The family spends the summer at a colonial mansion that strikes the narrator as odd. She and her husband move into an upstairs room. Along with the couple, John's sister Jennie is present serving as the housekeeper. At the time, the windows are barred, the wallpaper has been torn, there are metal rings in the walls - the kind that are used for restraints - and the floor is scratched. The narrator blames all these to children having resided there as most of the damage is away to their reach. Ultimately, readers are left to be unsure what is the source of the room's state, leading them to see the ambiguities in the unreliability of the narrator. It is strongly implied however that the room was formerly used as a prison to contain another mentally ill patient, as the bed has been nailed to the floor and there is a gate at the top of the stairs leading to the room.




The narrator devotes many journal entries to describing the wallpaper in the room - its "yellow" smell, its "breakneck" pattern, the missing patches, and the way it leaves yellow smears on the skin and clothing of anyone who touches it. She describes how the longer one stays in the bedroom, the more the wallpaper appears to mutate, especially in the moonlight. With no stimulus other than the wallpaper, the pattern and designs become increasingly intriguing to the narrator. She soon begins to see a figure in the design, and eventually comes to believe that a woman is creeping on all fours behind the pattern. Believing she must try to free the woman in the wallpaper, the woman begins to strip the remaining paper off the wall.




After many moments of tension between John and his wife, the story climaxes with the final day in the house. On the last day of summer, she locks herself in her room to strip the remains of the wallpaper. When John arrives home, she refuses to unlock the door. When he returns with the key, he finds her creeping around the room, circling the walls and touching the wallpaper. She excitedly exclaims, "I've got out at last... in spite of you and Jane", causing her husband to faint as she continues to circle the room, creeping over his inert body each time she passes it, believing herself to have become the personification of the woman trapped behind the yellow wallpaper.

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The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman