The Yellow Wallpaper
Charlotte Perkins Gilman, 1892
A woman on enforced rest in a rented house starts reading the wallpaper like a text. Short enough for one sitting, and unsettling for a long time afterwards.
Charlotte Perkins Gilman
1860–1935
Charlotte Perkins Gilman writes about minds under pressure and societies that could be otherwise, and she does it with a plainness that makes both feel close. Start with The Yellow Wallpaper, a short, quiet account of a woman on enforced rest who begins reading the wallpaper like a text; it stays with you longer than its length suggests. Moving the Mountain takes the same clear-eyed attention and turns it outward, following a man who returns after thirty years to an America that has remade poverty and family life, and has to see his own world as strange.
Feels like unease, madness and dread.
Start with The Yellow Wallpaper.
Gilman was herself prescribed the rest cure by the physician S. Weir Mitchell, and she later said she wrote this story to warn against that treatment.
A smell so insistent it can only be described as a colour.
It used to disturb me at first. I thought seriously of burning thehouse—to reach the smell.But now I am used to it. The only thing I can think of that it is likeis the color of the paper! A yellow smell. Books by Charlotte Perkins Gilman
Moving the Mountain
Charlotte Perkins Gilman, 1911
A man returns after thirty years to an America that has quietly abolished poverty and remade the family, and must learn to see his own world as strange.
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