The Yellow Wallpaper

By Charlotte Perkins Gilman

A woman battles confinement and her own mind in a room with haunting wallpaper.

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37 pages· 6,087 words

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Bookroo's summary

Trapped in an upstairs room by her controlling husband, a woman secretly writes in her journal, defying his orders. As her isolation deepens, she becomes obsessed with the wallpaper's patterns, imagining women trapped within. Her struggle for freedom blurs the line between reality and madness. Will she escape the confines of her mind and the room, or become one with the wallpaper's haunting figures?

From the publisher

The Yellow Wallpaper is regarded as an important early work of American feminist literature, illustrating attitudes in the nineteenth century toward women’s physical and mental health. The story also has been classified as Gothic fiction and horror fiction. The story is written as a collection of first person journal entries written by a woman whose physician husband has confined her to the upstairs bedroom of a house that he has rented for the summer. She is forbidden from working, and has to hide her journal entries from him, so that she can recuperate from what he calls a “temporary nervous depression-a slight hysterical tendency,” a diagnosis common to women in that period. Her husband controls her access to the rest of the house. In the end, she imagines that there are women creeping around behind the patterns of the wallpaper, and comes to believe that she is one of them. She locks herself in the room, now the only place where she feels safe, refusing to leave when the summer rental is up. Wilder Publications is a green publisher. All of our books are printed to order. This reduces waste and helps us keep prices low while greatly reducing our impact on the environment.

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