The Yelllow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman (Heathen Short)

The Yellow Wallpaper

Heathen Short #1
Author
Charlotte Perkins Gilman
Translator
First Edition
January 1892
Heathen Edition
2025
Refreshed
Pages
36
Heathen Genera
Arriving Soon-ish, Creepy AF
ISBN
979-8-90075-001-9

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.

Test Your Might

Available on backorder

"Grows and increases with a perfect crescendo of horror..."
Anne Montgomerie
Conservator

You might dig these, too!

The Beast with Five Fingers by W.F. Harvey (Heathen Short)

The Beast with Five Fingers

W.F. Harvey
The White People by Arthur Machen (Heathen Short)

The White People

Arthur Machen
The Monkey's Paw by W.W. Jacobs (Heathen Short)

The Monkey’s Paw

W.W. Jacobs
Carmilla by J. Sheridan Le Fanu (Heathen Edition)

Carmilla

J. Sheridan Le Fanu