YELLOW WALLPAPER: UNABRIDGED ORIGINAL CLASSIC

THE YELLOW WALLPAPER is a short story by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, published 1892, and is regarded as an important early work of American feminist literature for its illustration of the attitudes towards mental and physical health of women in the 19th century.

Narrated in the first person, the story is a collection of journal entries written by a woman who is isolated in her room to help her “recuperate” from depression and hysteria.

The narrator devotes many journal entries to describing the sickly yellow wallpaper in the room. 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 woman. 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 free the woman in the wallpaper, the woman begins to strip the remaining paper off the wall.