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| The Yellow Wallpaper | |
|---|---|
| Name | The Yellow Wallpaper |
| Author | Charlotte Perkins Gilman |
| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
| Genre | Short story, Gothic fiction, Feminist literature |
| Published | 1892 |
| Publisher | New England Magazine |
| Media type | |
The Yellow Wallpaper is an 1892 short story by American writer Charlotte Perkins Gilman. The work is framed as a series of journal entries by an unnamed narrator undergoing a rest cure in an isolated mansion, and it has become a touchstone in discussions of feminism, psychology, mental health reform, Gilded Age women's experience, and late 19th-century American literature. The narrative and its historical context intersect with figures, movements, institutions, and publications across American and transatlantic cultural history.
The story is presented as diary entries written by an unnamed woman confined by her physician husband in a colonial mansion near a small town. The narrator is sent to an upstairs nursery with barred windows and disturbing yellow wallpaper after giving birth; her husband, a physician, prescribes the rest cure popularized by Silas Weir Mitchell and practiced in institutions like the Danvers State Hospital. Isolated from friends, including her cousin and household servants, and prohibited from writing, she becomes obsessed with the wallpaper's complex pattern and perceived sub-patterns. Over weeks the narrator's mental state deteriorates as she imagines a woman trapped behind the pattern, struggling to escape; she begins to peer at the wallpaper day and night and to tear it. The climax occurs when she believes she has liberated the woman by peeling the paper off the walls, an act witnessed by her husband, who faints as she creeps around the room, symbolically subverting domestic authority figures like the physician and patriarchal figures modeled in contemporary legal and social institutions.
Central themes include the repression of women in domestic roles during the Victorian era and the constraints imposed by medical practices such as the rest cure and institutionalization in facilities like McLean Hospital. The story interrogates constructions of female hysteria popularized in the work of physicians like Jean-Martin Charcot and critics of such diagnoses, including activists aligned with first-wave feminism and reformers connected to the National American Woman Suffrage Association. It explores the politics of authorship and voice in relation to editors and publishers such as William Dean Howells and periodicals like The Atlantic Monthly; issues of privacy and surveillance resonate with legal precedents concerning property law and custody disputes involving women in the 19th-century United States. The narrative also engages with Gothic tropes common to writers like Edgar Allan Poe and Charlotte Brontë and with psychological realism found in the work of Henry James and Fyodor Dostoevsky. Themes of confinement intersect with social movements including temperance movement and public health debates influenced by institutions like the American Medical Association.
The unnamed narrator—often discussed alongside historical figures of feminist protest such as Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton—is a married woman described through her journal as suffering from a nervous condition. Her husband, John, is a physician who embodies medical authority comparable to practitioners like Silas Weir Mitchell and administrators of asylums such as Dorothea Dix-era reformers. Jennie, the sister-in-law who tends the household, represents domestic expertise akin to figures in domestic science movements and household periodicals like Godey's Lady's Book. Secondary figures include the house staff and unnamed local residents of the rural setting, which evokes small-town communities similar to places referenced by authors like Mark Twain and Nathaniel Hawthorne.
Originally published in The New England Magazine in January 1892, the story was later revised and republished by Gilman in collections and anthologies, intersecting with editors and publishers connected to Houghton Mifflin and periodicals like Harper's Magazine. Gilman's public critique of the rest cure connected her to contemporaries in reformist circles such as Jane Addams and influenced debates in medical journals of the era, including those read by members of the American Psychological Association. The text's dissemination through classroom anthologies linked it to curricula shaped by institutions like Smith College and Radcliffe College, bringing it into conversations among literary scholars at universities including Harvard University, Columbia University, and Yale University.
Scholars have analyzed the story through lenses associated with critical theorists and movements: feminist criticism influenced by figures like Simone de Beauvoir and bell hooks; psychoanalytic readings invoking theorists such as Sigmund Freud and Jacques Lacan; and historicist approaches referencing social reformers like Florence Kelley and legal scholars addressing women's rights cases such as Bradwell v. Illinois. Critics in the mid-20th century, including those writing in journals associated with Modern Language Association conferences and at presses like Oxford University Press, re-evaluated the story as a proto-feminist classic. Debates continue regarding authorship, reliability of the narrator, and the relationship between artistic representation and the practices of physicians like Silas Weir Mitchell.
The narrative has inspired stage plays produced in venues such as The Public Theater and adaptations for film and television screened at festivals like Sundance Film Festival and programmed by organizations including British Film Institute. Radio dramatizations have aired on networks like the BBC and National Public Radio, while dance and multimedia works have been presented at institutions such as Lincoln Center and the American Repertory Theater. Graphic novel and illustrated editions have been published by presses with ties to Pantheon Books and Penguin Books, and opera or musical treatments have been commissioned by companies associated with the Glimmerglass Festival and other performing arts presenters.
The story's influence extends to feminist movements, literary curricula at universities like University of California, Berkeley and University of Michigan, and public discourse on psychiatric care reform related to contemporary institutions such as National Institute of Mental Health. It has informed subsequent writers and artists, including figures in feminist prose and theory like Adrienne Rich and Sylvia Plath, and has been cited in scholarship published by presses like Routledge and Cambridge University Press. Its legacy persists in conferences sponsored by organizations such as the Modern Language Association and in museum exhibitions at cultural sites like the Smithsonian Institution that explore gender, literature, and medicine.
Category:1892 short stories Category:American short stories Category:Feminist literature