The Yellow Wallpaper

The Yellow Wallpaper is a short story by the American writer Charlotte Perkins Gilman, first published in January 1892 in The New England Magazine.

It is written as a series of journal entries, and the form is the point: the narrator is a woman who has been told that her illness is a nervous condition and that the cure is quiet, food and air, so the reader only ever sees the room she is kept in and the thoughts she is not supposed to be having. Her husband is a doctor and treats her with the confident kindness of a man who has no doubt about the diagnosis, and the story was written from experience, since Gilman had herself been prescribed a rest cure and found it nearly unendurable. What accumulates is a description of the wallpaper, which the narrator begins to find a pattern with something behind it, and the ending is a controlled piece of delirium. The story is read now both as an early landmark of American feminist writing and as one of the strongest short works of horror in the language, roles that fit it without any strain.

It was printed in the magazine at a time when the rest cure was a standard treatment for women, and it has been reprinted continuously since.