| ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
Amazon.co.uk Trade-In Store
Did you know you can trade in your old books for an Amazon.co.uk Gift Card to spend on the things you want? Visit the Amazon.co.uk Trade-In Store for more details. |
Product details
|
Tags Customers Associate with This Product(What's this?)Click on a tag to find related items, discussions, and people.
|
|
Share your thoughts with other customers:
|
||||||||||||||||||||||
|
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
18 of 18 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Excellent Short Story,
This review is from: The Yellow Wall-Paper (Paperback)
As a short story alone this work is outstanding. Stylistically it is sparse and chilling, and as a psychological tale the horror of the detail is left to the reader. That is not to say this is a horror tale as one would normally expect, but a powerful evocation of how women were often mistreated and degraded by Victorian culture. It chronicles the tale of a free-thinking and self-willed woman who is forced to take the infamous rest-cure to prevent her from stretching beyond the limited boundaries set for middle-class housewives in the nineteenth century. Enforced rest with little entertainment or stimulus is really a form of incarceration with damaging psychological effects. These effects are recorded through the shapes and figures that manifest through the ghastly yellow wallpaper, which is intended to beautify the room but actually represents prison bars in a different form. Powerful, short and effective, this is an excellent short story - and worth reading alongside The Awakening as two standard texts for feminist analysis of this particular era.
15 of 15 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A masterpiece of feminist fiction and a chilling horror tale,
By Rivercassini "Rivercassini" (London) - See all my reviews
This review is from: The Yellow Wallpaper (Virago Modern Classics) (Paperback)
Charlotte Perkins Gilman provides a stunning and disturbing account of a woman's decline in madness. Margaret Atwood comments in the Blind Assassin that life is little more than a period of waiting interspersed with a few significant moments. For the nameless women in The Yellow Wallpaper, this is one of those moments. Over a three month period we see in acute and distressingly real detail how her inability to match her identity with the role of submissive wife that late Victorian society demanded leads to a steady, inexorable descent from sagacity to despair. Suffering from some unnamed illness - which modern readers might relate to post-natal depression, she is confined to a room for rest and sleep. Unable to find any outlet for emotion or intellect, she becomes obsessed with the room's wallpaper - its complex and endless pattern of pointless swirls. At first she just dislikes it, then hatred bordering on fear follows, to be usurped by a semi-dependent fascination and ultimately total identity: she becomes, not so much the wallpaper, but the embodiment of the creeping women who dwell, reluctantly, behind the pattern.It is a picture of personal despair, of desperate attempts to retain sanity and ultimately of failure. On one level it's a chilling horror tale reminiscent of Edgar Allan Poe. On another it is a clinically precise picture of a mental aberration. But it is more than that. A powerful indictment of the institution of marriage, of the social mores and misguided kindliness of late Victorian middle-class America, and of the treatment of women, Gilman's story is as timeless as it is authentic.
7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Haunting gothic and chilling fable,
By
This review is from: "The Yellow Wallpaper (Dover Thrift) (Paperback)
This is a spine-tingling (not necessarily in a good way!) long short story with hauntingly gothic imagery that shifts and stirs beneath a prosaic surface.The female protagonist is confined to her room as a 'rest cure' which might be associated with what we now recognise as post-natal depression, but the enforced 'rest' that is more akin to imprisonment releases something in her psyche that might be madness... The yellow wallpaper of the title is both a kind of fairy-tale mirror and a window to another world that allows the narrator to see the female figures caught beneath it and living out their lives beneath its shadows, an incredibly haunting and indicting imagery for Victorian England. This is only short (more a long short story than a novella) but it will stay with you for all that.
Share your thoughts with other customers: Create your own review
Would you like to see more reviews about this item?
|
Most Recent Customer Reviews |
|
This product's forum
Active discussions in related forums
Search Customer Discussions
|
Related forums
|
|
|
|