The Yellow Wallpaper
by Charlotte Perkins Gilman
A woman confined to rest in a rented mansion stares at the wallpaper.
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Opening lines
It is very seldom that mere ordinary people like John and myself secure ancestral halls for the summer.
A colonial mansion, a hereditary estate, I would say a haunted house, and reach the height of romantic felicity—but that would be asking too much of fate!
Still I will proudly declare that there is something queer about it.
Else, why should it be let so cheaply? And why have stood so long untenanted?
John laughs at me, of course, but one expects that in marriage.
John is practical in the extreme. He has no patience with faith, an intense horror of superstition, and he scoffs openly at any talk of things not to be felt and seen and put down in figures.
John is a physician, and…
About the book
"The Yellow Wallpaper" is a short story by American writer Charlotte Perkins Gilman, told through first-person journal entries. A woman's physician husband rents an old mansion and confines her to an upstairs nursery for the summer, forbidding her to work or write; with nothing else to do, she observes the peeling yellow wallpaper as she gradually descends into madness. It is regarded as an important early work of American feminist literature and is also lauded as an excellent work of horror fiction.
About the author
Charlotte Perkins Gilman (July 3, 1860 – August 17, 1935) was an American humanist, novelist, writer, lecturer, early sociologist, and advocate for social reform, and a leading early figure in the U.S. women's rights movement. She is best known for the semi-autobiographical short story "The Yellow Wallpaper" (1892), Women and Economics (1898), a manifesto calling for women's economic independence, and the utopian feminist novel Herland (1915).
Summary prepared with AI from Wikipedia: The Yellow Wallpaper (CC BY-SA)
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