The Yellow Wallpaper: and Other Stories of Paranoia
Charlotte Perkins Gilman, D. Wallace, Searchtower Publishers
Paperback
(CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, Aug. 27, 2017)
Many famous maddening stories The Yellow Wallpaper, The Tell-Tale Heart, The Monkey's Paw, The Cask of Amontillado, B24, The Fall of the House of Usher, and An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge. This collection begins with two narrative stories. Taking us from our normal everyday life, into a gradual downfall to madness. First, The Yellow Wallpaper, an oppressed wife hides her journal filled with paranoia. She is recouping. From what her husband/physician calls, "a temporary nervous depression," with "hysterical tendencies." The diagnosis is common to women in that period. Next The Tell-Tale Heart, the erratic mad ramblings of a guilty conscience. Now to convince the reader of his sanity, he describes the murder he committed. Then concealed under the floorboards. In the end, the narrator's feelings of guilt result in his hearing the dead man's beating heart. Accompanied by The Monkey's Paw, with three wishes attached, to affect the owner. But the wishes come with an enormous price, for interfering with fate. The Cask of Amontillado is set in an unnamed Italian city at Carnival time. In an unspecified year, is about a man taking fatal revenge on a friend who, he believes insulted him. Then B24, one of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s great stories not related to Sherlock Holmes. Is he the accused or conspiracy, innocent or guilty. Consider the burglar caught in the act? Or has an unhappy wife used the opportunity to become a rich widow? You get to decide. With, The Fall of the House of Usher. The tale begins with a narrator arriving at the house of his friend, Roderick Usher. After receiving a disturbing message from him. Asking for help in a distant area of the country, complaining of an illness. As he arrives, the narrator notices a thin crack extending from the roof. Following it down the front of the building and into the neighboring lake. Winding up with one of my favorites, An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge. Farquhar a plantation owner in his mid-thirties is on an Alabama railroad bridge during the Civil War. He is being prepared for execution by hanging, with half a dozen military men and a company of infantrymen. They guard the bridge and carrying out the conviction. Farquhar thinks of his wife and children. Then sidetracked by a loud noise that, to him, sounds like a loud clanging; it is the conclusion of his vigil. He sees the possibility of leaping off the bridge and floating to safety. If he can free his tied hands, only the soldiers drop him from the bridge before he can act on the idea. And a popular outcome for TV episodes of the eerie kind. Charlotte Anna Perkins Stetson GilmanCharlotte Anna Perkins Gilman was born July 3rd in Hartford, Connecticut and died August 17th in Pasadena, California at age 75. A writer, commercial artist, magazine editor, lecturer and social reformer.Gilman was best known for three of her works, The Yellow Wallpaper, Herland, Women and Economics. The first was a story written after her own psychosis. In 1932 Gilman was diagnosed with breast cancer, she found herself terminally ill and took an overdose of chloroform dying quietly.