The Yellow Wallpaper

Story 2/31: The Yellow Wallpaper

by Charlotte Perkins Gilman

"It is the strangest yellow, that wallpaper! It makes me think of all the yellow things I ever saw - not beautiful ones like buttercups, but old foul, bad yellow things.” 

Listening Time: 32 minutes

https://librivox.org/ghost-story-collection-005/ (It's the tenth story on the list, at the very bottom. Ironically it's not a ghost story at all.)

Themes: Mental Health, Advocacy.

There is a really interesting article by the lady who wrote the story here:

 http://classiclit.about.com/od/yellowwallpapergilman/a/Why-I-Wrote-The-Yellow-Wallpaper.htm

There is another story I'll be talking about later that also deals with the "sinister yellow". A color that you'd normally associate with happiness becomes oppressive, irritating and maddening when used in excess.

In the narrator's room, there are many shades of yellow and all of them are UGLY! The wallpaper also has an intriguing design (For some reason I imagine the design to be inspired by Arabic script). The water damage and mold splotches on the wallpaper give the room unique visual effect: the walls...or something behind them...are moving.

"I never saw so much expression in an inanimate thing before, and we all know how much expression they have! I used to lie awake as a child and get more entertainment and terror out of blank walls and plain furniture than most children could find in a toy-store."

Over the course of the story, the narrator spends a lot of time in this room. She goes from being repulsed by the wallpaper to being fixated on it.

The first time I read it the story I thought:

But this year, reading it again, I'm very impressed with how concise the story is and how poignant the symbolism is. 

In a lot of these types of stories once you find out that the character is an unreliable narrator you can kind of be dismissive about the whole thing. Like: "Oh, they were just hallucinating the ghosts..." and "There was never any danger, they're just crazy".

In this story, you can't just write her off in that way. The horror isn't in whether or not she's having hallucinations, or whether or not there really are people stuck in the walls. We already know at the beginning really going on...so does she. 

"[but] what can one do?"

As a reader, you're put in the same position that she is; watching the whole situation spiral out of control and not being able to do anything about it. And that's what (I think) makes it an excellent piece of psychological horror.