The story ends with her finally escaping her prison, stepping over the prostrate body of her husband and freeing herself. She literally goes mad because she is imprisoned. All of this psychosis culminates into the narrator hallucinating a woman trapped behind the paper begging to be let free. The narrator in her loneliness and forced delusion starts to see patterns in the wallpaper. She looks at nothing else except for a small window that looks out into the world she is being kept from. There, she sits immersed in yellow peeling wall paper for weeks. Despite the narrators best efforts regarding her own self-care, Her husband treats her desires as a parent would treat a child and keeps her secluded from the world. The narrator has a bout of what was termed, “a nervous condition.” She is put into a country estate attic to rest and recuperate till her nervous condition ceases orchestrated by her well-meaning husband. The plot of the story is a woman’s slow descent into madness.

Even now parts of the theme echo through the ages as pertinent now as it was then. “The Yellow Wall Paper” is a masterpiece of women’s literature and feminism as it is both a narrative on mental illness and a treatise on the marginalization of women in the 1800’s. ― Charlotte Perkins Gilman, The Yellow Wallpaper and Other Stories I think it is due to this nervous condition.” “I’m sure I never used to be so sensitive. In addition to her masterpiece ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’, this new edition includes a selection of her best short fiction and extracts from her autobiography. Isolated in a crumbling colonial mansion, in a room with bars on the windows, the tortuous pattern of the yellow wallpaper winds its way into the recesses of her mind.Ĭharlotte Perkins Gilman was America’s leading feminist intellectual of the early twentieth century. ’īased on the author’s own experiences, ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’ is the chilling tale of a woman driven to the brink of insanity by the ‘rest cure’ prescribed after the birth of her child. In the places where it isn’t faded and where the sun is just so – I can see a strange, provoking, formless sort of figure, that seems to skulk about. ‘It is stripped off – the paper – in great patches. “But I MUST say what I feel and think in some way - it is such a relief! But the effort is getting to be greater than the relief”― Charlotte Perkins Gilman, The Yellow Wall-Paper About

The Yellow Wall Paper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman Book Reviews It Does Not Do to Trust People Too Much

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