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Product Description
Book Description
First published in 1892, this perfect novel portrays with chilling power the powerlessness of women within Victorian marriage.
Product Description
Charlotte Perkins Gilman wrenched this small literary masterpiece from her own experience. Narrated with superb psychological skill and dramatic precision, it tells the story of a nameless woman driven mad by enforced confinement after the birth of her child. Isolated in a colonial mansion in the middle of nowhere, forced to sleep in an attic nursery with barred windows and sickly yellow wallpaper, secretly she does what she has to do - she writes. She craves intellectual stimulation, activity, loving understanding, instead she is ordered to her bedroom to rest and 'pull herself together'. Here, slowly but surely, the tortuous pattern of the wallpaper winds its way into the recesses of her mind...
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
19 of 19 people found the following review helpful
Format: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
Format: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.
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.
8 of 8 people found the following review helpful
Format: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.
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.
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Most Recent Customer Reviews
Classic psychological short story
Set in one room and, ultimately, one mind, this short story describes a mentally tormented woman's continual chilling breakdown. Read more
Published 2 months ago by Verne
Why not redecorate?
Glad I read it. Title story has most power, but other stories more fun, showing woman triumphant through brains, wit and perseverance.
Published 3 months ago by Jackson
not what i was expecting
Not to my taste at all. i had not realised the author was a feminist and found the subject matter dire.
Published 5 months ago by Karen Jones
American Goth at its Best
Yellow Wallpaper is waaaaay ahead of it time. American Goth at its best! As brief as it is imaginative, this little book packs a powerful punch... Read more
Published 5 months ago by TMODN
Excellent
This item was a brilliant price and was in fantastic condition and it arrived fairly soon after I ordered it. Would definitely recommend the seller and the author alike.
Published 8 months ago by AR
The creeping women...
The Yellow Wallpaper is a brilliant short story that looks at anxiety/ post natal depression/ 'rest cure' treatments for women of the 19th century. Read more
Published 12 months ago by Pikah
So spooky
I got this book after meaning to read the yellow wallpaper for years (after seeing a TV adaptation when young, which always stayed with me) and it is an absolutely wonderful read... Read more
Published 16 months ago by greenamber83
Masterpiece?
This is strictly a review of The Yellow Wallpaper, not the other stories which I haven't read.
This was one of my favourite readings ever. Read more
This was one of my favourite readings ever. Read more
Published 18 months ago by Nina
"I've got out at last"
This is a small masterpiece. Inspired from her own life experiences, Gilman's short story tells the descent of a nameless married woman into insanity. Read more
Published 20 months ago by Brida
A sad and haunting story
This book is about a woman's decline into postnatal depression. It is well written with some highly descriptive passages, which I would really recommend reading. Read more
Published on 13 Jan 2010 by Mrs. D. HANSON
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