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In a long-unoccupied mansion, a new mother is confined to what was once a nursery. She is assured by her physician husband that it is a necessary cure to ease her “nervous depression.” Isolated and powerless, she becomes obsessed with the peeling, sickly colored wallpaper. In it, she sees what no one else can: a prisoner desperate to escape its maddening design.
A condemnation of the patriarchy,The Yellow Wallpaperexplores with terrifying economy the oppression, grave misunderstanding, and willful dismissal of women in late nineteenth-century society.
Revised edition: Previously published asThe Yellow Wallpaper,this edition ofThe Yellow Wallpaper (AmazonClassics Edition)includes editorial revisions.
22 pages, Kindle Edition
First published January 10, 1892
If a physician of high standing, and one's own husband, assures friends and relatives that there is really nothing the matter with one but temporary nervous depression—a slight hysterical tendency—what is one to do?This may not be a ghost story, but it is a tale of horror just the same. The most frightening books do not make me cower underneath my covers in the dark. They give the feeling of despair, they make the reader empathize with the darkness and emotional turmoil of the narrator. They make one feel claustrophobic.
“You think you have mastered it, but just as you get well underway in following, it turns a back-somersault and there you are. It slaps you in the face, knocks you down, and tramples upon you. It is like a bad dream.”
“I never saw a worse paper in my life. One of those sprawling flamboyant patterns committing every artistic sin.”
“But I MUST say what I feel and think in some way — it is such a relief! But the effort is getting to be greater than the relief.”
There is a delicious garden! I never saw such a garden—large and shady, full of box-bordered paths, and lined with long grape-covered arbors with seats under them.