THE YELLOW WALLPAPER

As powerful today as it was upon publication in 1892, an important, widely anthologized story of a descent into psychosis from America’s leading early 20th-century feminist intellectual Charlotte Perkins Gilman wrenched this small literary masterpiece from her own experience. Narrated with superb psychological skill and dramatic precision, it tells the story of a nameless woman driven mad by enforced confinement after the birth of her child. Isolated in a colonial mansion in the middle of nowhere, forced to sleep in an attic nursery with barred windows and sickly yellow wallpaper, secretly she does what she has to do—she writes. She craves intellectual stimulation, activity, and loving understanding, but instead she is ordered to her bedroom to rest and "pull herself together." Here, slowly but surely, the tortuous pattern of the wallpaper winds its way into the recesses of her mind.