Showing results for "The Yellow Wallpaper" in Anthologies

This collection brings together 12 of the finest short stories of prominent American feminist author Charlotte Perkins Gilman. "The Yellow Wallpaper", Gilman's best-known work, was first published in 1892 and represents an important examination of 19th-century attitudes toward women's physical and mental health.

Charlotte Perkins Gilman, (1860 - 1935), gained much of her fame with lectures on women's issues, ethics, labor, human rights, and social reform. She often referred to these themes in her fiction. She is best remembered for her 1892 short story "The Yellow Wallpaper", which was based on her own bout with severe depression and misguided medical treatment.

A woman, struggling with mental illness, fights to maintain her sanity in her home, haunted by an apparition from behind her bedroom’s yellow wallpaper.

Her supportive, though misunderstanding, physician husband, John, believes it is in her best interests to go on a "rest cure" after the birth of their child. The family spends the summer at a colonial mansion that has, in the narrator's words, "something queer about it" and her depression/anxiety, (commonly diagnosed today as postpartum depression), spirals out of control as she fixates on the yellow wallpaper in their bedroom.

The great-niece of Harriet Beecher Stowe, Gilman wrote much about the unequal status of women within the institution of marriage. The great-niece of Harriet Beecher Stowe, Gilman wrote much about the unequal status of women within the institution of marriage.

Presented in the first person, the story is a collection of journal entries written by a woman whose physician husband (John) has rented an old mansion for the summer and the couple moves into the upstairs nursery. As a form of treatment, she is forbidden from working, but encouraged to eat well and get plenty of exercise and air, so she can recuperate from what he calls a temporary nervous depression - a slight hysterical tendency, a diagnosis common to women in that period.

A new mother is brought by her doctor husband to a summer house to relax. He has determined that she suffers from a nervous condition. She is told to rest and she must have no intellectual or social stimulation. Her child and the house are taken care of by trusted others. She surreptitiously writes when no one is around. At first she is disturbed by the yellow wallpaper in the room she is staying in. when she requests another room, she is told that it is not good for her to have her whims attended to.

One of the earliest creative approaches to feminist literature, this sinister horror story tells of a woman's mental anguish and unconscious struggle with conformity in a society that generally viewed women as weak and hysterical creatures unable to think for themselves. The author, Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1860-1935), a prominent American feminist, paved the way for other authors like Sylvia Plath and Alice Walker. She suffered mental illness during her life and ultimately committed suicide.