The Yellow Wallpaper is a 6,000-word short story by the American
writer Charlotte Perkins Gilman, first published in January 1892 in The
New England Magazine.
i know its late but ehh oh well !
the story is a collection of journal entries written by a woman whose
physician husband (John) has rented an old mansion for the summer.
Forgoing other rooms in the house, the couple moves into the upstairs
nursery. As a form of treatment, the unnamed woman is forbidden from
working, and is encouraged to eat well and get plenty of exercise and
air, so she can recuperate from what he calls a "temporary nervous depression – a slight hysterical tendency", a diagnosis common to women in that period.[2][3]
She hides her journal from her husband and his sister the housekeeper,
fearful of being reproached for overworking herself. The room's windows
are barred to prevent children from climbing through them, and there is a
gate across the top of the stairs, though she and her husband have
access to the rest of the house and its adjoining estate.
The story depicts the effect of understimulation on the narrator's mental health and her descent into psychosis.
With nothing to stimulate her, she becomes obsessed by the pattern and
color of the wallpaper. "It is the strangest yellow, that wall-paper! It
makes me think of all the yellow things I ever saw – not beautiful ones
like buttercups, but old foul, bad yellow things. But there is
something else about that paper – the smell! ... The only thing I can
think of that it is like is the color of the paper! A yellow smell."[4]
In the end, she imagines there are women creeping around behind the
patterns of the wallpaper and comes to believe she is one of them. She
locks herself in the room, now the only place she feels safe, refusing
to leave when the summer rental is up. "For outside you have to creep on
the ground, and everything is green instead of yellow. But here I can
creep smoothly on the floor, and my shoulder just fits in that long
smooch around the wall, so I cannot lose my way.
