The Yellow Wallpaper and Selected Writings {Virago Modern Classics}

The title short story is Gilman’s classic story of a woman driven mad by her husband’s controlling “remedy” for her post-partum depression. Told in first person, the woman relates how her physician husband, John, has secured a colonial estate for their summer getaway. He is a very practical man and sure of his scientific facts. His prescription for his wife’s malaise is completely rest, and so she is locked in her attic bedroom, with its hideous yellow wallpaper and ordered to do NOTHING. No, not even a walk in the garden. And slowly she goes mad. Frankly, I was not a great fan of this story and dreaded reading the rest of the collection as a result, but I’m glad I persisted.

First published in 1892, Gilman’s story ignited show more some controversy, and she has been hailed as a feminist. She certainly is that. Among the stories in the collection is one involving a woman-developed pair of communities, where men take second place, and women run the show, and which prosper in a determined obscurity. Other stories show women stretching their wings and engaging in additional education or business pursuits despite their husband’s (or father’s or brother’s) objections, and succeeding, not just in their businesses but in life.

While the focus of virtually all these stories is the lives of women –how they are repressed, how they overcome, how they succeed – there is one notable story, Mr Peebles’s Heart, that shows the advantages to the man in the relationship from also spreading his wings and giving over some of the duties traditionally assigned to men to a woman in his life (wife, employee, sister, etc). show less

This was one strange story but portrays well how mental illness has been viewed in the past as well as a societal view of women in the not to distant past. The tale follows one women's descent into madness and it is really a wild ride. She lives in a room which has yellow wallpaper and a bed fastened to the floor. Pretty shocking and wild on it's own as a spooky story for something like Halloween. It can also be studied as a peek into the stigma of mental illness or for how society has marginalized women and their very real problems. Pretty creepy.