The Yellow Wallpaper
(eBook)

The Yellow Wallpaper', by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, is a short story first published in January 1892. The psychological thriller by the renowned US women's rights writer and campaigner is an autobiographical-inspired novella based upon her own experience of severe postnatal depression, leading to post-natal psychosis. At the time, women with PND (known in America as postpartum depression) were seen as hysterical and were often dismissed by doctors who overlooked treatment options through lack of understanding of the condition. In Perkins' short story, written tellingly from the first-person perspective, the nameless female protagonist is forced to sleep in an attic with yellow wallpaper and is driven mad by her enforced imprisonment following the birth of her first child. The book describes in detail how she sees imagined beings and ghostly sightings in the house. Disturbing in its nature yet utterly realistic to the heroine, the protagonist offers a diary-style narrative detailing her experience as a new mother suffering with severe mental illness: "I don't know why I should write this. I don't want to. I don't feel able. And I know John would think it absurd. But I must say what I feel and think in some way-it is such a relief! But the effort is getting to be greater than the relief." Evoking gothic themes of Charlotte Bronte's 'Jane Eyre', in both Jane Eyre's own tortuous and notorious Red Room and Bertha Mason's confinement in her loft prison, the book was made into a film in 2011 - directed by Logan Thomas and starring Aric Cushing and Juliet Landau.