I absolutely love The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman. I have read it at least a few dozen times since first discovering the novella in undergrad. The story was assigned to me in an English course titled “American Realism and Naturalism” during my time at Whittier.

Certainly, because I read the story under a class that focused on the realism and naturalism styles, I find that the narrative fits into both the realism and naturalism stylistic traditions. Gilman writes moments where the narrator speaks as though she is describing normal life, and writes moments where the narrator speaks as though pre-existing forces are controlling her. In doing so, Gilman highlights the attitudes towards mental and physical health, particularly in women, in 19th century America.

Published in 1892 in The New England Magazine, The Yellow Wallpaper opens with the narrator describing the colonial mansion that she and her husband were lucky enough to acquire for the summer. The narrator is outrightly suspicious of the property because it’s so cheap but quickly changes gears to describe her husband.

John is a physician, which the narrator often points out during moments of her quick decline. John constantly disregards her symptoms; however, he insists she does not work or write. She is to only rest, as she has recently given birth. As an early modernist, one of the things I’m interested in John’s restrictions on the narrator’s writing. Especially since the narrator expresses the positive feelings, she experiences when writing. She describes her writing as a sense of freedom, which contradicts her reality of being trapped in this grand summer home.

The majority of the story centers around the narrator’s infatuation with the yellow wallpaper in her bedroom. She describes its strange patterns and how it darkens on one side of the room due to damage from the children who lived in the home previously. The wallpaper disgusts her to the point of obsession. Only weeks after being in the house, the narrator becomes possessive of the wallpaper and skeptical of John and her nanny, Jennie. She even writes about catching and watching both John and Jennie staring at the wallpaper.

The narrator’s mental health further declines as she begins to see a woman, and later many women, in the yellow wallpaper. The narrator describes the women as frightening, often mentioning how they “creep” around her home, mainly in the garden.

The story reaches its climax when the narrator is left alone, and she manages to tear down the wallpaper. In such a short amount of time, Charlotte Perkins Gilman describes the narrator’s experience not just with mental illness but with the denial of mental illness from those around her.

Gilman is also the author of Herland, another feminist novel that centers around a society built, run, and entirely occupied by women. I’ll be reviewing this one soon!

But for now…

Thank you for reading,