The Yellow Wallpaper

The Yellow Wallpaper is a short story by the American writer Charlotte Perkins Gilman, first published in January 1892 in The New England Magazine. Written as a secret journal kept by an unnamed narrator, the story describes her confinement, on the orders of her physician husband John, to the upstairs nursery of a rented country house as part of the once-standard rest cure prescribed for what he diagnoses as a temporary nervous depression following the birth of their child, a treatment that forbids her from working, writing or any real mental activity. Left largely alone in the room, whose walls are covered in a repellent yellow wallpaper with a chaotic, sprawling pattern, the narrator becomes increasingly fixated on the paper, gradually perceiving a trapped woman moving behind its outer pattern, whom she comes to believe she must free by tearing the paper from the walls. By the story's final scene the narrator has descended fully into psychosis, identifying herself with the woman she imagines freeing from the wallpaper, and is discovered by her husband creeping around the stripped room, at which point he faints, and she continues creeping over his prostrate body. Drawing directly on Gilman's own experience of the rest cure prescribed to her by the physician Silas Weir Mitchell after the birth of her daughter, the story became a landmark early feminist text, widely read as a critique of the medical and marital control exercised over women's minds and bodies in the nineteenth century.