"The Yellow Wallpaper" by Charlotte Perkins Gilman

Published 1892

 

Plot Synopsis

In the late 19th century, a woman and her husband move to a pastoral home as a treatment for her depression, only to prove the old adage that the cure can be far worse than the disease.

 

Review:

I first encountered this masterpiece years ago in a cheap aged trade paperback anthology of classic horror stories.  As an avid collector I usually avoid paperbacks entirely, though the occasional trade edition may merit a purchase if it's rare or collectible or just plain hard to find in hardback.  This edition didn't really fit any of those criteria, but something about its yellowed pages bespoke the possibility of tantalizing, whispered secrets (or, in simpler consumer terms, I heard it shouting “buy me!” for some odd reason), so I rescued it from the shelf of a used book store.

“The Yellow Wallpaper” is a seminal achievement and, if my sources are correct, the only Weird Tale Ms. Gilman ever penned.  It is at once many things, fraught with two main possible interpretations.  Is it one of the most unsettling haunted house (or, rather more precisely, haunted room) stories ever told, or is it one of the most unsettling accounts of a woman’s descent into madness?  My opinion is the latter but reading the story with this viewpoint in no way diminishes its impact upon finishing or, while reading, the incredible uneasiness which impends upon the reader as reality, or the main character’s perception of it, slowly becomes unhinged.    

Beneath the main story is the none too subtle but deftly presented commentary on the way in which doctors treated depression near the turn of the 19^th century.   Even more so, it is illustrated how women deemed to have “hysterical tendencies” were treated like children with no sense of what was best for their own mental state.  If a person, especially a woman, were diagnosed as depressed, then they were advised to stay in bed and rest (read: sleep) as much as possible with occasional brief forays outside for “air” and exercise.  In effect, the “cure” often exacerbated the illness and drove the person more deeply into a state melancholia.  Can you imagine a 21^st century psychiatrist telling a patient with a depressive mood disorder that the best thing for them would be to sleep more?

Reality is very localized for the central character as she spends nearly the entire story within a single room of the estate house which her husband has procured in hopes of curing her of “nervous depression.”   The room where she spends almost every minute (one gets the sense she is treated vitiatingly like a queen under house arrest) is covered in an unusual yellow wallpaper that from the onset upsets and unsettles her.  It is in the patterns of this wallpaper that the woman’s deteriorating mental state (or her ability to sense the malleable boundaries of reality) are slowly revealed.  That the ending seems inevitable from the story’s outset is immaterial, the writing is just so good that it is still a visceral gut punch of tragedy and frustration at her situation.

If there are any fellow worms out there that have yet to come across “The Yellow Wallpaper,” or just haven’t made time for that classic short story collection gathering dust on the mantelpiece, I strongly urge you to give it a read immediately.   You will not be disappointed, and you might miss more than a few hours of sleep pondering just how tenuous a hold you have on your own sanity.