The Yellow Wallpaper (1892)

’This paper looks to me as if it KNEW what a vicious influence it had!

There is a recurrent spot where the pattern lolls like a broken neck and two bulbous eyes stare at you upside down. I get positively angry with the impertinence of it and the everlastingness. Up and down and sideways they crawl, and those absurd, unblinking eyes are everywhere. There is one place where two breadths didn't match, and the eyes go all up and down the line, one a little higher than the other.’

Man, that yellow wallpaper has some nerve. Sure, the woman was obviously going insane prior to moving to this house with that vicious yellow wallpaper but honestly? If that worthless husband of hers would have just changed it when she told him to none of this would have happened. So I blame the husband. And that vicious yellow wallpaper.

But honestly?



If that shit was on my walls I’d probably go crazy too. ( )

One of my favorite short stories of all time! Beautifully haunting psychological thriller! ( )

Got to this a little late, but I got there. I thought it was...very good? Writing style grabbed me and kept me engaged. I found the symbolism a little obvious. By comparison, Wilde was writing at the same time and I thought his way of talking about being trapped by society was subtler and weirder. But this was sharp, modern, intense writing; you could also compare it to something like Dracula (1895), which is miles behind it.

What it really should be compared to is Florence Marryat's Blood of the Vampire, which also deals with hysteria. Marryat is longer, so it has more room and it's unfair to compare them - and Yellow Wall-paper has more of an immediate punch anyway. But Marryat's subtler and sneakier.

But that last scene in Yellow Wall-paper*...I had been expecting her to commit suicide, especially thanks to all the mentions of rope, but the image she left me with instead was even better. That was a great, haunting image.

* you know how much it bugs me to put a hyphen in that word? But that's how they did it back in the olden days, kids. ( )

This was a creepy little story! I really liked it though.

Written as a series of journal entries, we see this woman slowly descend into madness. She's forcibly secluded away in a single room of a rented house for the summer, so that she can rest away what her physician husband calls her "temporary nervous depression," and she is prevented from working, interacting with people other than the few allowed by the hubs, banned from writing, presumably reading or doing anything, and in short is just left to her own limited devices... cooped up in this one room.

It's no wonder to me at all that she should be in the condition she's in. With her husband pulling rank and cutting her off from the normal world, she starts to break with reality and begins to see the wallpaper as jailing a woman inside them.

The way that the wallpaper is described in the diary is perfect. Just the right amount of eeriness mixed in with artistic terminology and mundane everyday stuff and suspicions and paranoia to realize that this is an intelligent woman slowly losing her mind. Most likely, she was only suffering from postpartum depression, and Mr. Husband-Knows-Best completely broke her. It's kind of sad, really.

Brilliant story though. The writing was excellent, and it conveyed so much more than the page count would have you think. ( )

Originally published in 1899, the slight, 30-odd page story is one of the creepiest glimpses into the process of a mental breakdown I have ever read. Republished by The Feminist Press in 1973, the afterword of the edition I read spoke of the author’s prolific career as a writer, poet, publisher, and academic. She wrote several textbooks, opened her own school, and for several years of her life wrote, published, and edited her own magazine, which amounted to about 21,000 words per month. (Hedges, Afterword to the 1973 Feminist Press edition, 38.) In other words, Gilman was a total badass. However, the short story captures the prisoner-like aspects of the submissive role that many women lived at the time of publication, both in terms of marriage and societal expectations overall. The protagonist of the story is left in a room, with little to no social contact and no medical treatment. As the story progresses her mental condition worsens and those around her coddle her but do nothing proactive to alleviate her situation. It is scary, realistic, and her lack of choices and the guilt she is made to feel are heart-wrenching. Gilman's writing draws you right into the story and right down the slide of sanity in a way I will never forget. I absolutely recommend this work to anyone who enjoys short stories, people who like to read about mental illness, and anyone interested in 19th century feminism. ( )