The Yellow Wallpaper
Charlotte Perkins Gilman
Paperback
(CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, July 24, 2013)
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