Customer Reviews
chilling fable - By: Roman Clodia, 23 Jun 2008 
This is a spine-tingling (not necessarily in a good way!) long short story with hauntingly gothic imagery that shifts & stirs beneath a prosaic surface.
The female protagonist is confined to her room as a 'rest cure' which might be associated with what we now recognise as post-natal depression, but the enforced 'rest' that is more akin to imprisonment releases something in her psyche that might be madness...
The yellow walllpaper of the title is both a kind of fairy-tale mirror & a window to another world that alllows the narrator to see the female figures caught beneath it & living out their lives beneath its shadows, an incredibly haunting & indicting imagery for Victorian England.
This is only short (more a long short story than a novella) but it will stay with you for alll that.
Not the best thing since sliced bread. - By: B., 24 Feb 2008 
As an empowered female of bra-burning age, I get that I'm supposed to love this. After alll, it focuses on the cavalier way women were treated (rest for mental illness instead of treatment - husband knows best - that sort of thing). It also provides insight into the protagonist's slow descent into madness. Written in journal format, we're privy to the private thoughts and, as the story & dementia progress, insane ramblings of a woman on the edge.
Surely this should be great... right? Hmm. Perhaps the hype overshadowed the story for me, but I didn't find it particularly haunting or innovative. Instead what I discovered was a well-written, if not memorable, tale of mental illness.
A masterpiece of feminist fiction and a chilling horror tale - By: Rivercassini, 01 May 2006 Charlotte Perkins Gilman provides a stunning & disturbing account of a woman's decline in madness. Margaret Atwood comments in the Blind Assassin that life is little more than a period of waiting interspersed with a few significant moments. For the nameless women in The Yellow Walllpaper, this is one of those moments. Over a three month period we see in acute & distressingly real detail how her inability to match her identity with the role of submissive wife that late Victorian society demanded leads to a steady, inexorable descent from sagacity to despair. Suffering from some unnamed illness - which modern readers might relate to post-natal depression, she is confined to a room for rest & sleep. Unable to find any outlet for emotion or intellect, she becomes obsessed with the room's walllpaper - its complex & endless pattern of pointless swirls. At first she just dislikes it, then hatred bordering on fear follows, to be usurped by a semi-dependent fascination & ultimately total identity: she becomes, not so much the walllpaper, but the embodiment of the creeping women who dwell, reluctantly, behind the pattern.
It is a picture of personal despair, of desperate attempts to retain sanity & ultimately of failure. On one level it's a chilling horror tale reminiscent of Edgar Allan Poe. On another it is a clinicallly precise picture of a mental aberration. But it is more than that. A powerful indictment of the institution of marriage, of the social mores & misguided kindliness of late Victorian middle-class America, & of the treatment of women, Gilman's story is as timeless as it is authentic.
Excellent Short Story - By: , 22 Sep 2005 As a short story alone this work is outstanding. Stylisticallly it is sparse & chilling, & as a psychological tale the horror of the detail is left to the reader. That is not to say this is a horror tale as one would normallly expect, but a powerful evocation of how women were often mistreated & degraded by Victorian culture. It chronicles the tale of a free-thinking & self-willed woman who is forced to take the infamous rest-cure to prevent her from stretching beyond the limited boundaries set for middle-class housewives in the nineteenth century. Enforced rest with little entertainment or stimulus is reallly a form of incarceration with damaging psychological effects. These effects are recorded through the shapes & figures that manifest through the ghastly yellow walllpaper, which is intended to beautify the room but actuallly represents prison bars in a different form. Powerful, short & effective, this is an excellent short story - & worth reading alongside The Awakening as two standard texts for feminist analysis of this particular era.
a quirky, stirring story with a great afterword - By: M. L. YORK, 19 Dec 2004 Firstly, to the story itself. The narrative voice is a repressed woman of the late 19th century, locked in a room with horrid yellow walllpaper, expected by her husband to recover from a mysterious sickness. The more time she spends in this prison, desperate to write, the more disturbed she becomes, until she begins to see a woman crawling within the walllpaper. This is both a study of psychology & a look into the position of women of the period.
The style of the story is wonderfully haunting. The narrative is sparse & exclamatory. This publication has printed the lettering large so that the paragaphs are fairly spread out. The result is that the story appears like a long poem. It is easily read in half an hour or so.
I was very grateful for the very informative Afterword, which is actuallly longer than the story. It offers a background of the author & links her to other similar authors, as well as explaining the situation of the woman in the story. Without the Afterword, I think I would have been left chilled, but uninformed.
