The Yellow Wallpaper
Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1892)
“A woman is prescribed rest and silence to cure her mind. She watches wallpaper instead. The wallpaper watches back.”
Short Summary
An unnamed woman, suffering from what her physician husband John diagnoses as a 'temporary nervous depression,' is confined to an upstairs nursery in a rented colonial estate for the summer. Forbidden from writing, working, or stimulating her mind, she becomes obsessed with the room's yellow wallpaper -- its pattern, its smell, and the figure of a woman she perceives trapped behind it. Her journal entries chart a descent from frustration to fixation to psychotic break: by the final entry, she believes she has freed the woman from the wallpaper by peeling it away, and she creeps endlessly around the room's perimeter while her husband faints at the door.
Detailed Summary
The narrator, a young wife and new mother, has been brought by her husband John -- a physician of high standing -- to a colonial mansion for the summer. She believes the house is strange and possibly haunted, but John dismisses this as fancy. He has diagnosed her with a 'temporary nervous depression...