The Yellow Wallpaper
Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1860–1935), 1892
★ 4.06 from 392.9k ratings on Goodreads
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. A tight first-person voice slides from wry observation into creeping dread, and the quiet pace makes the unease feel close.
Feels like unease, dread and defiance. About madness, identity and society.
Who it’s for
You may like it if you enjoy unreliable narrators, domestic settings turned strange, and short fiction that leaves a lingering chill. Be prepared for the narrator's language to grow increasingly disordered and for a claustrophobic, unsettled feeling throughout.
Why read it
It shows how a prescribed routine can narrow a mind, and its short, sharp unease stays with you after the last page.
Pages from the book
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. Some wallpaper is merely ugly. This one appears to be watching.
But I must not think about that. This paper looks to me as if it knewwhat a vicious influence it had!There is a recurrent spot where the pattern lolls like a broken neckand two bulbous eyes stare at you upside-down. Stare at a pattern long enough and you start to hear it argue.
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. Charlotte Perkins Gilman.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.
Books that feel like this
More 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.
Where to get it
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Questions readers ask
- Is The Yellow Wallpaper for me?
- You may like it if you enjoy unreliable narrators, domestic settings turned strange, and short fiction that leaves a lingering chill. Be prepared for the narrator's language to grow increasingly disordered and for a claustrophobic, unsettled feeling throughout.
- What is The Yellow Wallpaper like?
- A tight first-person voice slides from wry observation into creeping dread, and the quiet pace makes the unease feel close. Feels like unease, dread and defiance. About madness, identity and society.
- What should I read after The Yellow Wallpaper?
- If you liked The Yellow Wallpaper, try The strange case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (Robert Louis Stevenson), The Turn of the Screw (Henry James) and Carmilla (Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu).
A taste of the feed
A mind wakes up with no history, and nobody to ask.
“But where were my friends and relations? No father had watched my infant days, no mother had blessed me with smiles and caresses; or if they had, all my past life was now a blot, a blind vacancy in which I distinguished nothing. From my earliest remembrance I had been as I then was in height and proportion. I had never yet seen a being resembling me or who claimed any intercourse with me. What was I? The question again recurred, to be answered only with groans.
Frankenstein · Mary Shelley
You walk toward your own double across a quicksand.
One night his dream was so vivid that when he awoke he could not believe that it had only been a dream. He shut his eyes again and again, but each time the vision, if it was a vision, or the reality, if it was a reality, would rise before him. The moon was shining full and yellow over the quicksand as he approached it; he could see the expanse of light shaken and disturbed and full of black shadows as the liquid sand quivered and trembled and wrinkled and eddied as was its wont between its pauses of marble calm. As he drew close to it another figure came towards it from the opposite side with equal footsteps.
Dracula's Guest · Bram Stoker
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