The Yellow Wallpaper (Bedford Cultural Editions)

The Yellow Wallpaper (Bedford Cultural Editions) Review

Plot Summary:
A young family goes to a country home in a small American town for the summer. The husband is a physician who hopes that being in the country will help his wife over her currently unhappy state. The wife is probably suffering from what we would call postpartum depression. She often feels tired, and her physician husband's cure for this is to isolate her in the attic of their rented home. The attic has barred windows, a bed nailed to the floor, and hideously yellow wallpaper. As time moves on, we see the woman, who narrates the story, become more and more enthralled with the wallpaper- first she sees it as ugly, then she sees patterns and shapes in it and finally she sees that there is a woman trapped behind it, trying desperately to get out. And she decides to help this poor woman escape.

My thoughts:
In The Yellow Wallpaper, the narrator asks her husband multiple times to let her out and to allow her to socialize and write and enjoy her life, but he refuses, citing her health as his reason. As the narrator says, her husband "is very careful and loving, and hardly lets me stir without special direction." Thus, isolated as she is and suffering from what starts as a seemingly mild form of mental illness, the woman in The Yellow Wallpaper descends into insanity and no one even notices until it is too late.

I think this is a very important story when one considers women's health and the coddling way in which women were (and still often are) treated. Here is a story of a woman who tried to stand up for herself, but was told to just relax by her dear, sweet husband who always knows and wants what is best for her. The narrator's thoughts on the yellow wallpaper also morph and change with her mental state and her own feelings. What begins as ugly wallpaper turns to moldy and smelly paper and then finally becomes a prison for a woman stuck behind it, yearning to break out. And the narrator tries to help this imprisoned woman get out, in much the way she herself wants to escape her room and her life.

This story conveys a great deal in a very limited amount of space. It's also a very important work for its time- it sheds light on both mental illness and the role and rights of a woman in a family. It really makes clear just how unhappy women were in some circumstances, Gilman proves in her short story that unhappiness can lead us all to commit desperate acts. Whether to gain love, or freedom, or just to remove herself from horrible circumstances, a woman will leave her person and personality behind to escape her reality.

Highly recommended for fans of Kate Chopin's The Awakening. I also highly recommend Stephen Benatar's Wish Her Safe at Home!

The Yellow Wallpaper (Bedford Cultural Editions) Overview

This edition of Charlotte Perkins Gilman's "The Yellow Wallpaper" is based on the 1892 "New England Magazine" text of the story. The edition includes a selection of documents designed to help students situate the story in relation to Gilman's time period and wide range of interests. Included are 19th-century advice manuals for young women and mothers; medical texts discussing the nature of women's sexuality; social reform literature concerning women's rights; the working classes, and immigration; and excerpts from periodicals, diaries, and writers notebooks that reflect the sense of the changing literary scene of the time.

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