Month: July 2017

Book Review: The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman

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TheYellowWall-PaperAbout the Book

First published in 1892, The Yellow Wallpaper is written as the secret journal of a woman who, failing to relish the joys of marriage and motherhood, is sentenced to a country rest cure. Though she longs to write, her husband and doctor forbid it, prescribing instead complete passivity. In the involuntary confinement of her bedroom, the hero creates a reality of her own beyond the hypnotic pattern of the faded yellow wallpaper – a pattern that has come to symbolize her own imprisonment. Narrated with superb psychological and dramatic precision, The Yellow Wallpaper stands out not only for the imaginative authenticity with which it depicts one woman’s descent into insanity, but also for the power of its testimony to the importance of freedom and self-empowerment for women.

Format: ebook Publisher:   Pages: 29
Publication: [1892] Genre: Short Story    

Purchase Links*
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*links provided for convenience, not as part of any affiliate programme

Find The Yellow Wallpaper on Goodreads

My Review

The Yellow Wallpaper forms part of my Classics Club Challenge.

This short story certainly punches above its weight. It has an air of underlying menace that is quite chilling.   The house itself contributes to this:

‘Still I will proudly declare that there is something queer about it. Else, why should it be let so cheaply? And why have stood so long untenanted?’

Although there are elements of a horror story – the house no-one wants to rent, the wallpaper with its strange pattern, the barred windows, the feeling of being under constant observation – it is really an unnerving account of mental disintegration.   The author forces the reader to question whether the narrator’s husband is really interested in his wife’s welfare and anxious for her recovery or using her condition to exercise control over her.

‘He is very careful and loving, and hardly lets me stir without special direction.’

And is their room really a former nursery, with its barred windows, peeling wallpaper, rings in the walls and heavy bedstead fixed to the floor? Or has it had, does it still have, a more sinister function?

The book exposes the distorted attitude to mental illness of the time (particularly women’s mental illness) – that the person just needs to exercise more self-control, to pull them self together to overcome it. The narrator’s husband dismisses his wife’s feeling of repulsion toward the wall-paper out of hand:

‘..He said that I was letting it get the better of me, and that nothing was worse for a nervous patient than to give way to such fancies.’

In the end, the narrator’s disintegration is complete and shocking, even more so because the story is semi-autobiographical, written while the author was suffering from what we would now recognise as post-natal depression.

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In three words: Chilling, unsettling, dark

Try something similar…The Pit and the Pendulum by Edgar Allen Poe

CharlottePerkinsGilmanAbout the Author

Charlotte Perkins Gilman was a prominent American sociologist, novelist, writer of short stories, poetry, and non-fiction, and a lecturer for social reform. She was a utopian feminist during a time when her accomplishments were exceptional for women, and she served as a role model for future generations of feminists because of her unorthodox concepts and lifestyle.

Are You Monogamous or Polygamous (When it Comes to Books)?

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MonogamyorPolygamy

Do you like to devote yourself to one book at a time and give it all your book love, only then moving on to the next? Or do you enjoy having a number of books on the go, flirting with each as the mood takes you? To put it another way, do you like to read in sequence or in parallel?

I can see pros and cons to both but I’ll ‘fess up now to being a dyed-in-the wool polygamist…when it comes to books.

In Praise of Book Monogamy

  • You can give your full attention to the book – the story, the characters, the writing – without any distraction
  • You won’t have any problem picking up where you left off because it will be fresh in your mind, not obscured by anything else you’ve read in between
  • You’ll get through the book in a shorter elapsed time
  • If it’s a challenging read – a long book, a complex subject or unusual writing style – you’ll be able to apply your full concentration to it
  • It will be much easier to recall when you come to write that all important review
  • No temptation to switch to another book leaving the current one unfinished
  • Ideal for the self-disciplined

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In Praise of Book Polygamy

  • You can switch between books depending on your mood. For example, perhaps a few chapters from something light-hearted when you’re feeling a bit down and then back to something more thrilling when you crave excitement.   Or something gentler and slower for bedtime reading.
  • If you’re struggling to get into a particular book, you can switch to another for a time and go back to the first book later.
  • Less chance of a DNF because of the above
  • You can take a break from a challenging read but, rather than do something entirely non-book related, you can polish off a few chapters of another quite different book
  • You may pick up similarities or common themes between books that you wouldn’t have noticed if you’d read them separately
  • You’ve got more chance of finding a book with the right chapter length to fit those odd reading opportunities during the day
  • Ideal for the multi-tasker

So, do you practice monogamy or polygamy when it comes to books?