The Yellow Wallpaper
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Average rating4.1
The Yellow Wallpaper (original title: "The Yellow Wall-paper. A Story") is a 6,000-word short story by the American writer Charlotte Perkins Gilman, first published in January 1892 in The New England Magazine. It is regarded as an important early work of American feminist literature, illustrating attitudes in the 19th century toward women's health, both physical and mental.
Presented in the first person, the story is a collection of journal entries written by a woman whose physician husband (John) has rented an old mansion for the summer. The entries display a spiral into psychosis as the writer tried to solve the mystery of the yellow wallpaper.
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The story is about a woman in the 1800s who has to spend a lot of time alone in a house, with an ugly yellow wallpaper. The circumstances/events or a lack thereof, results in a relationship forming between the woman and the wallpaper.
The slow transition into insanity appears to me as a means of escape.
“I really have discovered something at last. Through watching so much at night, when it changes so, I have finally found out. The front pattern does move - and no wonder! The woman behind shakes it! Sometimes I think there are a great many women behind, and sometimes only one, and she crawls around fast, and her crawling shakes it all over. Then in the very ‘ bright spots she keeps still, and in the very shady spots she just takes hold of the bars and shakes them hard. And she is all the time trying to climb through.”
I was hopeful about the situation first, then came the hopelessness and later the bliss of insanity at the end. I was surprised, that so much could happen in a short story. It was never rushed. The gradual blending of the psyche of the wallpaper and the woman is quite believably portayed; which is horrifying.
Appeals to my morbid interests.
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