The Yellow Wallpaper

Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s short story “The Yellow Wallpaper” was first published in 1892 in The New England Magazine; many literature scholars consider it a classic of feminist literature. The story contains a critique of the restrictive and counterproductive “rest cure,” invented by Dr. Silas Weir Mitchell and popular in the late 1800s, as well as a comment on patriarchy, marriage, gender roles, and the female voice.

The stream of consciousness style of narration as well as the structure of the story allows the reader access to the inner world of the narrator, a woman whose post-childbirth experience follows the emotional and psychological path of Gilman’s own episode of postpartum depression. Through the ten diary entries that make up the whole of the short story, the reader experiences the narrator’s mental breakdown alongside the narrator herself. The diary entries and sentence lengths change and transform as the story progresses, reflecting the narrator’s rapid decline into madness.

The narrator has been prescribed a version of the rest cure by her physician husband John, so she writes from the confinement of her bedroom in a rented country house where they are spending the summer with their young baby and two members of staff.