The Yellow Wallpaper illuminates the challenges of being a woman of ambition in the late 19th century. Was her “escape” her salvation or had she finally lost her mind? Readers are left to reach their own conclusions. Now why should that man have fainted? But he did, and right across my path by the wall, so that I had to creep over him every time! I’ve got out at last … and you can’t put me back. Her husband, on opening the door, collapses as the narrator declares: “I wonder if they all come out of that wallpaper as I did?” she asks.

At the end of the story the narrator takes the opportunity of her husband’s absence to lock the door and tear away the wallpaper, the women now creeping outside in the garden. Behind it, dim shapes get clearer by the day, sometimes of many women, sometimes one, stooping down and creeping about behind the pattern. It is the wallpaper that dwells increasingly on the narrator’s mind with its “vicious influence”. Mitchell instructed Gilman to live as domestic a life as possible “and never touch pen, brush or pencil as long as you live”. Gilman was treated with the “rest cure”, devised by Mitchell, as is the protagonist of the story like an infant, she was dosed, fed at regular intervals and above all ordered to rest. “City-bred” women, Mitchell concluded, might be poorly equipped to fulfil the natural functions of motherhood. Women were reported to be putting themselves at risk of nervous collapse with their eagerness to take on roles unsuited to their gender, including higher education or political activities. Neurasthenia took hold in modernising America in the closing decades of the 19th century, as incessant work was said to ruin the mental health of its citizens. The story can also be seen as a rich account of neurasthenia or nervous exhaustion, a disorder first defined by Mitchell in his book Wear and Tear, or Hints for the Overworked in 1871. United States Library of Congress's Prints and Photographs division / Wikipedia The narrator spends much of her days being cared for – and often left alone – in this room, reading, attempting to write (though the subterfuge this involved leaves her weary, she noted) and, increasingly, watching the wallpaper, as it starts to take on a life of its own.Ĭharlotte Perkins Gilman. It is the room’s wallpaper, a “repellant” and “smouldering unclean yellow”, with “sprawling flamboyant patterns committing every artistic sin” that forms the centrepiece of the story. Perhaps, the narrator muses, it had once been a nursery or playroom. The wallpaper is torn, the floor scratched and gouged.

The room her husband selects as their bedroom, though large, airy and bright, is barred at the window and furnished with a bed that is bolted to the floor.

The house is “queer”, long abandoned and isolated.

There she is to rest, take tonics, air and exercise – and absolutely forbidden to engage in intellectual work until well again. The narrator is brought by her physician husband to a summer retreat in the countryside to recover from her “temporary nervous depression – a slight hysterical tendency”. Gilman’s short story is a straightforward one.

Gilman city retreat