The Yellow Wall-Paper

Author: Charlotte Perkins Gilman
Genre: Fiction
Publisher: New England Magazine, 1892
Pages: 24
Rating: Recommend

Synopsis: The Yellow Wallpaper is a valuable piece of American feminist literature that reveals attitudes toward the psychological health of women in the nineteenth century. Diagnosed with "temporary nervous depression - a slight hysterical tendency" by her physician husband, a woman is confined to an upstairs bedroom. Descending into psychosis at the complete lack of stimulation, she starts obsessing over the room's yellow wallpaper: "It is the strangest yellow, that wall-paper! It makes me think of all the yellow things I ever saw - not beautiful ones like buttercups, but old foul, bad yellow things. But there is something else about that paper - the smell! . . .The only thing I can think of that is like the color of the paper! A yellow smell."

Review: I was looking for a short story to catch up on my reading challenge, but what an interesting find. I tend to avoid short stories as a general rule because I like to dive into characters and plots, but this story kept my attention and had me digging for more information
about it. 

This novel was first printed in a magazine in 1892, and was immediately denounced in the press. There is far more information available on Wikipedia, and I went down the rabbit hole. Wow.

Why wasn't this assigned reading in high school. The discussion and conversations would have been so interesting.