Charlotte Perkins Gilman: The Yellow Wallpaper

“The Yellow Wallpaper” written in 1892 by Charlotte Perkins Gilman is a slow, brilliant descent into madness, an early feminist triumph by the author, a cry for equality, a prayer for recognition. It’s a page-turner.

On the face of it, the female protagonist/narrator suffers from nothing more serious than a nervous disposition acerbated by recent childbirth. John, her over-solicitous husband will seemingly do anything to help her regain her strength, both physically and emotionally. To this end, the small family rent a colonial mansion in the country.

The narrator soon discovers there’s something decidedly not right about the house. Her concerns are pooh-poohed by her husband in a way that is equally unsettling. Although she would prefer the downstairs bedroom papered in beautiful red roses, he insists they take the larger old nursery upstairs, which was once covered in a hideous yellow paper. Gilman’s descriptions of the wallpaper become more ghastly as the story moves along:

“The color is repellant, almost revolting; a smoldering, unclean yellow, strangely faded by the slow-turning sunlight. … It is a dull yet lurid orange in some places, a sickly sulphur tint in others.”

And, “There is a recurrent spot where the pattern lolls like a broken neck and two bulbous eyes stare at you upside-down.”

Because the narrator is discouraged from doing anything beyond resting, she studies the wallpaper. Bit by bit it takes her on a journey that is both horrific and life-altering. All the while, her husband insists that she is getting stronger and on her way to recovery, leaving the reader to wonder if he is the author of her illness or she was crazy all along.

Talk about a wild ride.

Charlotte Perkins (1860-1935) wrote “The Yellow Wallpaper” after a personal bout of postpartum psychosis. An early feminist, many of her works focus on the unbalanced division of labor between the sexes. The story was made into a film in 2011 by the same name. It can be read in full at Project Gutenberg, an online library of more than 75,000 free eBooks.