The Yellow Wallpaper

About the book

A woman staying in a rented country house is discouraged from work and writing by her physician husband, who believes rest will restore her health. She records her thoughts in secret, returning increasingly to the yellow wallpaper in the room chosen for her. Gilman makes the journal's intimate, interrupted form central to the story: expression must find a place within a household that treats the narrator's own account of her needs as unreliable. Descriptions of the room gradually acquire a pressure that ordinary reassurance cannot relieve. The story examines the difficult boundary between care and control, especially when professional authority reinforces domestic power. Its brevity and changing patterns of attention create a disturbing experience of confinement without offering a comfortable viewpoint outside the narrator's predicament.

• Confinement
• Care and control
• Voice and authority

Why read it

For a concentrated first-person narrative whose very form embodies the struggle to be heard.

English text