The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman
This 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 rented for the summer.
She is forbidden from working, and hides her journal entries from her husband. Her husband
controls her access to the rest of the house. A key locks the door.The story depicts the
effect of confinement 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 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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