2018 Reprint of 1892 Edition. This short story is regarded as an important early work of American feminist literature, illustrating attitudes in the 19th century toward women's health, both physical and mental. Presented in the first person, the story is a collection of journal entries written by a woman whose physician husband (John) has rented an old mansion for the summer. Forgoing other rooms in the house, the couple moves into the upstairs nursery. As a form of treatment, the unnamed woman is forbidden from working, and is encouraged to eat well and get plenty of exercise and air, so she can recuperate from what he calls a temporary nervous depression - a slight hysterical tendency, a diagnosis common to women in that period. Gilman used her writing to explore the role of women in America at the time. She explored issues such as the lack of a life outside the home and the oppressive forces of the patriarchal society. Through her work Gilman paved the way for writers such as Alice Walker and Sylvia Plath.
The Yellow Wallpaper is regarded as an important early work of American feminist literature, illustrating attitudes in the nineteenth century toward women's physical and mental health. The story also has been classified as Gothic fiction and horror fiction. The story is written as a collection of first person journal entries written by a woman whose physician husband has confined her to the upstairs bedroom of a house that he has rented for the summer. She is forbidden from working, and has to hide her journal entries from him, so that she can recuperate from what he calls a temporary nervous depression-a slight hysterical tendency, a diagnosis common to women in that period.
Her husband controls her access to the rest of the house. In the end, she imagines that there are women creeping around behind the patterns of the wallpaper, and comes to believe that she is one of them. She locks herself in the room, now the only place where she feels safe, refusing to leave when the summer rental is up.
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The Yellow Wallpaper (original title: The Yellow Wall-paper. A Story) is a 6,000-word short story by the American writer Charlotte Perkins Gilman, first published in January 1892 in The New England Magazine. It is regarded as an important early work of American feminist literature, illustrating attitudes in the 19th century toward women's health, both physical and mental.
Presented in the first person, the story is a collection of journal entries written by a woman whose physician husband (John) has rented an old mansion for the summer. Forgoing other rooms in the house, the couple moves into the upstairs nursery. As a form of treatment, the unnamed woman is forbidden from working, and is encouraged to eat well and get plenty of exercise and air, so she can recuperate from what he calls a temporary nervous depression - a slight hysterical tendency, a diagnosis common to women in that period. She hides her journal from her husband and his sister the housekeeper, fearful of being reproached for overworking herself. The room's windows are barred to prevent children from climbing through them, and there is a gate across the top of the stairs, though she and her husband have access to the rest of the house and its adjoining estate.
The story depicts the effect of understimulation on the narrator's mental health and her descent into psychosis. With nothing to stimulate her, she becomes obsessed by the pattern and color of the wallpaper. It is the strangest yellow, that wall-paper It makes me think of all the yellow things I ever saw - not beautiful ones like buttercups, but old foul, bad yellow things. But there is something else about that paper - the smell ... The only thing I can think of that it is like is the color of the paper A yellow smell.
In the end, she imagines there are women creeping around behind the patterns of the wallpaper and comes to believe she is one of them. She locks herself in the room, now the only place she feels safe, refusing to leave when the summer rental is up. For outside you have to creep on the ground, and everything is green instead of yellow. But here I can creep smoothly on the floor, and my shoulder just fits in that long smooch around the wall, so I cannot lose my way.
Source: Wikipedia
The Yellow Wallpaper (original title: The Yellow Wall-paper. A Story) is a 6,000-word short story by the American writer Charlotte Perkins Gilman, first published in January 1892 in The New England Magazine. It is regarded as an important early work of American feminist literature, illustrating attitudes in the 19th century toward women's health, both physical and mental.
Presented in the first person, the story is a collection of journal entries written by a woman whose physician husband (John) has rented an old mansion for the summer. Forgoing other rooms in the house, the couple moves into the upstairs nursery. As a form of treatment, the unnamed woman is forbidden from working, and is encouraged to eat well and get plenty of exercise and air, so she can recuperate from what he calls a temporary nervous depression - a slight hysterical tendency, a diagnosis common to women in that period. She hides her journal from her husband and his sister the housekeeper, fearful of being reproached for overworking herself. The room's windows are barred to prevent children from climbing through them, and there is a gate across the top of the stairs, though she and her husband have access to the rest of the house and its adjoining estate.
The story depicts the effect of understimulation on the narrator's mental health and her descent into psychosis. With nothing to stimulate her, she becomes obsessed by the pattern and color of the wallpaper. It is the strangest yellow, that wall-paper It makes me think of all the yellow things I ever saw - not beautiful ones like buttercups, but old foul, bad yellow things. But there is something else about that paper - the smell ... The only thing I can think of that it is like is the color of the paper A yellow smell.
In the end, she imagines there are women creeping around behind the patterns of the wallpaper and comes to believe she is one of them. She locks herself in the room, now the only place she feels safe, refusing to leave when the summer rental is up. For outside you have to creep on the ground, and everything is green instead of yellow. But here I can creep smoothly on the floor, and my shoulder just fits in that long smooch around the wall, so I cannot lose my way.
Source: Wikipedia
2023 Hardcover Reprint of 1892 Edition. This short story is regarded as an important early work of American feminist literature, illustrating attitudes in the 19th century toward women's health, both physical and mental. Presented in the first person, the story is a collection of journal entries written by a woman whose physician husband (John) has rented an old mansion for the summer. Forgoing other rooms in the house, the couple moves into the upstairs nursery. As a form of treatment, the unnamed woman is forbidden from working, and is encouraged to eat well and get plenty of exercise and air, so she can recuperate from what he calls a temporary nervous depression - a slight hysterical tendency, a diagnosis common to women in that period. Gilman used her writing to explore the role of women in America at the time. She explored issues such as the lack of a life outside the home and the oppressive forces of the patriarchal society. Through her work Gilman paved the way for writers such as Alice Walker and Sylvia Plath.
Designed to appeal to the book lover, the Macmillan Collector's Library is a series of beautifully bound pocket-sized gift editions of much loved classic titles. Bound in real cloth, printed on high quality paper, and featuring ribbon markers and gilt edges, Macmillan Collector's Library are books to love and treasure. This edition is introduced by journalist and author Lucy Mangan.
The Yellow Wallpaper & Herland embodies Charlotte Perkins Gilman's radical feminism and her lifelong battle to give women a voice in a world ruled by men.
Part of the Gibbs Smith Women's Voices series: A collection of literary voices written by, and for, extraordinary women--to encourage, challenge, and inspire.
Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1860-1935) championed women's rights in her prolific fiction, nonfiction, and poetry.
Discover three influential works by one of America's first feminists in their unabridged form: the short story The Yellow Wallpaper, a haunting interpretation of postpartum depression; the feminist utopian novel Herland; and Women and Economics, which when published in 1898 established Gilman as a sociologist, philosopher, ethicist, and social critic, and is considered by many to be her greatest work.
Continue your journey in the Women's Voices series with Jane Eyre, by Charlotte Bronte (ISBN: 978-1-4236-5099-7), The Feminist Papers, by Mary Wollstonecraft (ISBN: 978-1-4236-5097-3), Hope Is the Thing with Feathers, the complete poems of Emily Dickinson (ISBN: 978-1-4236-5098-0), and Little Women, by Louisa May Alcott (ISBN: 978-1-4236-5211-3).
Charlotte Perkins Gilman's short story The Yellow Wallpaper is one of the key texts in American women's fiction and also a rallying cry for feminism. Since its original printing in 1892, it has been routinely anthologized in collections of women's literature, American literature, and textbooks. This volume gathers nine other equally momentous stories by a diverse group of renowned American women authors who changed the world with their compelling tales. These ten stories testify to the power of the imagination to create personal transformation and political change.
Authors whose stories appear in this unique collection are:
Charlotte Perkins Gilman
Djuna Barnes
Kate Chopin
Sui Sin Far
Zora Neale Hurston
Nella Larsen
Gertrude Stein
Elizabeth Stoddard
Frances Ellen Watkins Harper
Edith Wharton
First appearing in 1892 The Yellow Wallpaper is a searing vision of a distinctively feminine form of madness and commands attention as an arresting tale of horror and a moving look into a woman's mind.
The story uncompromisingly thrusts the reader into the mind of the narrator. She is a woman forced, ostensibly for her own good, into a 'rest cure', a psychological straitjacket so constricting that she begins to unravel. Her mental dissolution is described with such fierce immediacy that The Yellow Wallpaper has been read and anthologized as a chilling horror tale. While it can easily be appreciated for its disorienting thrills, the story's true resonance comes from its matter-of-fact portrayal of a woman pushed to the rim of sanity by society's demands and her family's utter inability to conceive of the fact that she cannot fit within their strictures. Shot through with unforgettable images of the yellow wallpaper, its shadowy depths and what seems to lurk there, The Yellow Wallpaper builds to a climax that combines the narrative impact of an Edgar Allan Poe story with a wrenching protest of the treatment of women. Unique and genre-bending, Gilman's story was unrivaled in its era and its power endures undiminished today.
With an eye-catching new cover, and professionally typeset manuscript, this edition of The Yellow Wallpaper is both modern and readable.
When a woman's physician husband rents them an old mansion for the summer to help treat her temporary nervous depression, something is waiting in the old nursery walls for her. Locked away with only her journal and her mind, will she be able to escape the psychological prison her husband has trapped her in.
Herland (1915) is a utopian novel by American author and feminist Charlotte Perkins Gilman. Herland was originally published in The Forerunner, a monthly magazine edited by Gilman, before going out of print for the next several decades. The novel was republished with an influential introduction by scholar Ann J. Lane in 1979 and has since been recognized as an important work of science fiction written by a leading feminist of the early twentieth century.
A sociologist and his two friends embark on an expedition to discover a rumored land where a lost civilization of women lives apart from the rest of the world. They journey by plane and, upon landing, are quickly captured by a group of women. Taken to town, the men are held in a central fortress where they are treated well and encouraged to learn more about the women's culture in order to assimilate. They are taught the history of the land, which has been without men for two thousand years, and learn that the women are able to reproduce asexually. Although they recognize the utopian qualities of the society and despite being impressed by the beauty and order of its structures, the men struggle to live without presupposed notions of gender and patriarchy. When an escape attempt goes awry, they are forced to abandon their prejudices, joining the society through marriage. When one of the group fails to respect their hosts' ideals of gender equality, however, the men are forced to make a decision that could endanger the continued existence of the utopia.
With a beautifully designed cover and professionally typeset manuscript, this edition of Charlotte Perkins Gilman's Herland is a classic of American literature and science fiction reimagined for modern readers.
The Yellow Wallpaper, first published in 1882, is largely based on the personal experience of Charlotte Perkins Gilman. Like many women of that era, Gilman was subjected to the rest cure for postpartum depression. The cure, pioneered by Silas Weir Mitchell, forbade reading, writing, socializing, exercise, and thinking in general. For many women, the treatment was worse than the cure.
The story chronicles the story of a women diagnosed with a slight hysterical tendency and shut up in a wallpapered yellow room in an old mansion over the summer. With no intellectual stimuli other than the wallpaper, the narrator becomes increasingly intrigued with its intricate pattern, twisting and turning it in her mind until she sees a woman on all fours crawling creeping behind the pattern.
Believing she must free the woman in the wallpaper, the narrator secretly begins stripping it from the walls. Tension mounts between the characters in the story, right along with the narrator's increasing derangement. The story reaches its peak as the narrator increasingly identifies herself as the trapped old woman. When her husband finally discovers her in this sorry state, he faints on the spot. The narrator, unfazed, continues creeping over his body each time she circles the room, trying to free the old woman-and ultimately herself, from the wallpaper's deeply disturbing pattern.
The book's indictment of the rest cure contributed, eventually, to its discontinuation. The patronizing attitudes and actions of the narrator's husband, combined with her childish position, drove her to retreat into the only place she was allowed to actively use her mind or exercise the slightest bit of control over her life-the yellow wallpaper. Forced to pretend that her marriage was happy, forced to pretend that she was overcoming depression, and restricted from any form of self-expression, the narrator was eventually driven insane. The importance of patient input into their treatment, as well as of self-expression, are important themes of this classic feminist work.