The Yellow Wallpaper

An important classic “must-read” and a still widely popular short story by the American writer Charlotte Perkins Gilman, The Yellow Wallpaper is regarded as an important early work of American feminist literature, illustrating attitudes in the 19th century toward women's physical and mental health. Told in the first person, the story is a series of journal entries written by a woman (Jane) whose physician husband (John) has confined her to the upstairs bedroom of a house. She is forbidden from working and has to hide her journal from him, so she can recuperate from what he calls a "temporary nervous depression – a slight hysterical tendency," a diagnosis common to women in that period. The brilliant short story depicts the effect of confinement on the narrator's mental health and her descent into psychosis. With nothing else to stimulate her, she becomes progressively obsessed by the pattern and color of the wallpaper.