Other editions of book The Yellow Wall Paper

Based on the 1892 New England Magazine text, this teaching edition of The Yellow Wallpaper includes a generous selection of historical materials. The documents are organized into thematic units and features nineteenth-century advice manuals for young women and mothers; medical texts discussing the nature of women's sexuality; social reform literature concerning women's rights, the working classes, and immigration; and excerpts from periodicals, diaries, and writers' notebooks that give students a sense of the changing literary scene that Gilman entered. Editorial features designed to help students read the novel in light of the documents include a general introduction providing historical and cultural background, a chronology o Hawthorne's life and times, an introduction to each thematic group of documents, headnotes, extensive annotations, a generous selection of illustrations, and a selected bibliography.

"The Yellow Wallpaper" is a 6,000-word short story by the American writer Charlotte Perkins Gilman, first published in January 1892 in The New England Magazine. It is regarded as an important early work of American feminist literature, illustrating attitudes in the 19th century toward women's physical and mental health.Presented in the first person, the story is a collection of journal entries written by a woman whose physician husband has confined her to the upstairs bedroom of a house he has rented for the summer. 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 windows of the room are barred, and there is a gate across the top of the stairs, allowing her husband to control her access to the rest of the house.The story depicts the effect of confinement on the narrator's mental health and her descent into psychosis. With nothing to stimulate her, she becomes obsessed by the pattern and color of the wallpaper. "It is the strangest yellow, that wall-paper! It makes me think of all the yellow things I ever saw - not beautiful ones like buttercups, but old foul, bad yellow things. But there is something else about that paper - the smell! ... The only thing I can think of that it is like is the color of the paper! A yellow smell."In the end, she imagines there are women creeping around behind the patterns of the wallpaper and comes to believe she is one of them. She locks herself in the room, now the only place she feels safe, refusing to leave when the summer rental is up. "For outside you have to creep on the ground, and everything is green instead of yellow. But here I can creep smoothly on the floor, and my shoulder just fits in that long smooch around the wall, so I cannot lose my way."A woman gradually suffers a mental breakdown as a result of confinement and denial of her creative energies by her husband.

"The Yellow Wallpaper" is a 6,000-word short story by American writer Charlotte Perkins Gilman, first published in January 1892 in New England Magazine. It is regarded as an important early work of American feminist literature, illustrating attitudes in the 19th century toward women's physical and mental health.The story is written in the first person as a series of journal entries. The narrator is a woman whose husband — a physician — has confined her to the upstairs bedroom of a house he has rented for the summer. She is forbidden from working and has to hide her journal entries from him so that she can recuperate from what he has diagnosed as a "temporary nervous depression — a slight hysterical tendency;" a diagnosis common to women in that period. The windows of the room are barred, and there is a gate across the top of the stairs, allowing her husband to control her access to the rest of the house.

* Includes custom illustrationsFollow the journal entries of a young woman suffering from an anxiety disorder as she descends into madness.This illustrated edition of "The Yellow Wallpaper" is a 6,000-word short story by the American writer Charlotte Perkins Gilman, first published in January 1892 in The New England Magazine. It is regarded as an important early work of American feminist literature, illustrating attitudes in the 19th century toward women's physical and mental health.

Charlotte Perkins Gilman: The Yellow WallpaperIt 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.

The classic narrative study of Gilman's own depression and a compelling study of the burgeoning feminism in the early twentieth century. "Every kind of creature is developed by the exercise of its functions. If denied the exercise of its functions, it can not develop in the fullest degree." —Charlotte Perkins Stetson A journal of the descent into madness of a woman suffering from a ''temporary nervous depression — a slight hysterical tendency.'' Hints throughout the story suggest the woman's problem is the recent birth of her child, insinuating postpartum depression. Confined in an upstairs room to recuperate by her well-meaning but dictatorial and oblivious husband, the yellow wallpaper in the room becomes the focal point of her growing insanity. “For many years I suffered from a severe and continuous nervous breakdown tending to melancholia—and beyond. During about the third year of this trouble I went, in devout faith and some faint stir of hope, to a noted specialist in nervous diseases, the best known in the country. This wise man put me to bed and applied the rest cure, to which a still good physique responded so promptly that he concluded that there was nothing much the matter with me, and sent me home with solemn advice to 'live as domestic a life as possible,' to 'have but two hours' intelligent life a day,' and 'never to touch pen, brush or pencil again as long as I lived.' This was in 1887…" —Charlotte Perkins Gilman, "Why I Wrote the Yellow Wall-paper," 1913

Presented in the first person, the story is a collection of journal entries written by a woman (Jane) whose physician husband (John) has confined her to the upstairs bedroom of a house he has rented for the summer. 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 windows of the room are barred, and there is a gate across the top of the stairs, allowing her husband to control her access to the rest of the house.

Based on the 1892 New England Magazine text, this teaching edition of The Yellow Wallpaper includes a generous selection of historical materials. The documents are organized into thematic units and features nineteenth-century advice manuals for young women and mothers; medical texts discussing the nature of women's sexuality; social reform literature concerning women's rights, the working classes, and immigration; and excerpts from periodicals, diaries, and writers' notebooks that give students a sense of the changing literary scene that Gilman entered. Editorial features designed to help students read the novel in light of the documents include a general introduction providing historical and cultural background, a chronology o Hawthorne's life and times, an introduction to each thematic group of documents, headnotes, extensive annotations, a generous selection of illustrations, and a selected bibliography.

'The Yellow Wallpaper' is a semi-autobiographical short story drawing on Charlotte Gilman's personal experience of mental collapse, exacerbated by the paternalistic attitudes current in her day, a tale which doubles as the perfect vehicle for protesting the unequal status of women in marriage. In 1886, after the birth of her daughter, Gilman was struck with severe post-natal depression. Medical opinion at the time ascribed this condition to too much mental activity for the female mind, and she was prescribed a "rest cure". For an intellectual like Gilman, such forced inactivity was a disaster, and a full nervous breakdown ensued. In 'The Yellow Wallpaper' a young woman tells of a similar enforced idleness, and we watch with horrified fascination her slow descent into madness. Suffering from depression, she is forced to 'rest' in a barred room, where her agitated mind becomes obsessed by the room's yellow wallpaper, upon whose chaotic swirls she seeks to impose order and pattern. Gradually, the image of a stooping, creeping woman appears - held captive by the 'bars' of the main pattern - a potent symbol for the stultifying effects of both her personal life and society at large. Eventually, deeply unstable, she sees trapped, creeping women everywhere, and knows herself to be quite as confined as any within the yellow wallpaper. Although known now for her prose, Charlotte Gilman first rose to prominence through the excellence of her verse. 'Woman' - the central section of Gilman's highly acclaimed 'In this World' - comprises twenty-nine poems that expand upon the theme of female emancipation and cover a wide range of topics - from female suffrage through marriage and motherhood, to male vanity and willing female submission. Widely regarded in its day, 'Woman' has continued to be a source of inspiration for many modern-day feminists.