It is stripped off — the paper — in great patches all around the head of my bed, about as far as I can reach, and in a great place on the other side of the room low down. I never saw a worse paper in my life.
One of those sprawling flamboyant patterns committing every artistic sin.
It is dull enough to confuse the eye in following, pronounced enough to constantly irritate, and provoke study, and when you follow the lame, uncertain curves for a little distance they suddenly commit suicide — plunge off at outrageous angles, destroy themselves in unheard-of contradictions.
The color is repellant, almost revolting; a smouldering, unclean yellow, strangely faded by the slow-turning sunlight.
It is a dull yet lurid orange in some places, a sickly sulphur tint in others.
No wonder the children hated it! I should hate it myself if I had to live in this room long . . .
Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1860–1935) was an American humanist, author, lecturer, sociologist, social reform advocate, and utopian feminist whose best-known work is her chilling, semi-autobiographical masterpiece, “The Yellow Wallpaper,” which redefined feminist literature. Inspired by Gilman’s battle with postpartum depression and the damaging “rest cure” prescribed by her doctor, this gripping psychological short story plunges into a woman’s unraveling mind and descent into madness that blurs the line between fiction and lived experience. Told through fragmented diary entries and the creeping obsession with the wallpaper in her room, Gilman exposes the terrifying consequences of a woman being confined and dismissed by those meant to heal her. Raw, intimate, and disturbingly real, “The Yellow Wallpaper” is a literary reckoning whose timeless brilliance, eerie symbolism, and haunting emotional power is an unnerving triumph.
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“A weird story.” —The Literary World
“’The Yellow Wallpaper‘ is a literary gem and ranks with Poe’s best work.” —The Minneapolis Journal
“Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s greatest literary achievement . . . a landmark feminist work and an important contribution to the American literary canon.” —Twentieth-Century Literary Criticism
“Rises to a classic level in subtly.” —H.P. Lovecraft
“That strange study of physical environment, ‘The Yellow Wallpaper,’ deservedly ranks as one of the most powerful of American short stories.” —Current Literature
“Deceptively simple.” —Loralee MacPike, American Literary Realism 1870-1910
“Grows and increases with a perfect crescendo of horror . . . The story is simple, serious, sly, fascinating, torturing. It is embodied excitement. It is brooding insanity.” —Anne Montgomerie, Conservator
“A striking example of unadulterated pessimism in book form is ‘The Yellow Wallpaper,’ which is quite hair-raising and as creepy as even the most perverted imagination could desire to feed upon.” —The Richmond Times-Dispatch
“[A] remarkable study in progressive mania . . . It is a gruesome, but wonderfully strong and vivid little story . . . But unless the publishers of the book wish to be responsible for a large crop of maniacs, they ought not to have covered it with what is apparently a reproduction of that fateful wallpaper. After one glance at its pattern, one cannot wonder that the poor woman went crazy.” —The Los Angeles Times
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