Five-minute digest
The Yellow Wallpaper
Summary
"The Yellow Wallpaper" is a short story by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, first published in The New England Magazine in January 1892 and issued as a small book in 1899. It takes the form of a secret journal kept by an unnamed young wife and mother whose husband, John, a physician, has diagnosed her with "temporary nervous depression" after the birth of their baby. For the summer John rents an old country mansion and installs his wife in a large upstairs room that she believes was once a nursery, with barred windows, rings in the walls, a bed nailed to the floor and torn, sickly yellow wallpaper. She is to rest, take tonics and avoid all "work", including writing, and is kept from company and from her baby, who is cared for by a nurse. She writes in secret and comes to hate the wallpaper's sprawling pattern. Confined and idle, she studies the paper for hours and begins to see a woman trapped behind its pattern, shaking it and creeping about by moonlight. Her husband, his sister Jennie and her own brother, also a physician, treat her concerns as fancies, and John warns that if she does not improve he will send her to Weir Mitchell in the fall. In the final entries she locks herself in and tears the paper from the walls to free the woman, whom she now identifies with herself. When John gets the locked door open he finds her creeping around the room, and he faints; she must creep over him as she goes. Gilman drew on her own treatment with the rest cure in 1887. The story was little read for decades, but its 1973 reissue by the Feminist Press made it one of the most widely taught American short stories, read both as a Gothic tale of madness and as a criticism of nineteenth-century medicine and marriage.
Top Lessons
Medical authority and the patient's voice
The narrator's husband and brother, both physicians, overrule her own sense of what would help her. The story asks how illness should be understood and who gets to decide.
The unreliable narrator
Everything is filtered through a mind in crisis. Readers must judge what is real and what the narrator imagines.
Confinement as symbol
The barred room, the nailed-down bed and the trapped woman in the paper all suggest the narrator's situation. Students can trace how setting becomes meaning.
Verified Quotes
“If a physician of high standing, and one’s own husband, assures friends and relatives that there is really nothing the matter with one but temporary nervous depression—a slight hysterical tendency—what is one to do?”
“Personally, I believe that congenial work, with excitement and change, would do me good.”
“John says if I don’t pick up faster he shall send me to Weir Mitchell in the fall.”
“There are things in that paper that nobody knows but me, or ever will.”
““I’ve got out at last,” said I, “in spite of you and Jane! And I’ve pulled off most of the paper, so you can’t put me back!””
Medical Lens
The story is a fictional case of what is now usually described as postpartum depression progressing to psychosis under the rest cure. The narrator's physician husband diagnoses "temporary nervous depression" and "a slight hysterical tendency", forbids work and writing, and isolates her; S. Weir Mitchell is named as the next resort. Gilman based it on her own 1887 treatment by Mitchell and explained her purpose in "Why I Wrote The Yellow Wallpaper" (The Forerunner, October 1913). It is widely used in teaching on women and medicine, the doctor-patient relationship and the history of psychiatry.
- Opening entries
John's diagnosis of nervous depression and hysterical tendency; tonics, air and a ban on work.
- Opening entries
The narrator cannot be with her baby because it makes her so nervous.
- Middle entries
John threatens to send her to Weir Mitchell in the fall.
- Final entries
She tears the paper, creeps around the room and identifies with the woman behind the pattern.
- Throughout
Her own judgment about her treatment is overruled by her husband and brother.