You will be reading an American Gothic short story titled
"THE YELLOW WALLPAPER" by Charlotte Perkins Gilman.
ABOUT THE BOOK:
The story details in first-person (in the form of a series of journal entries) the descent into madness of a woman suffering from what her physician husband describes as a "temporary nervous depression — a slight hysterical tendency." The story hints that part of the woman's problem is that she recently gave birth to a child, insinuating she may be suffering from what would, in modern times, be called postpartum depression.
The story details in first-person (in the form of a series of journal entries) the descent into madness of a woman suffering from what her physician husband describes as a "temporary nervous depression — a slight hysterical tendency." The story hints that part of the woman's problem is that she recently gave birth to a child, insinuating she may be suffering from what would, in modern times, be called postpartum depression.
The narrator is confined in an upstairs room to recuperate by her well-meaning but dictatorial and oblivious husband, but this treatment only exacerbates her depression.
The room is decorated with yellow wallpaper that becomes the focal point of her insanity. She devotes many journal entries to obsessively describing the wallpaper — its "yellow" smell, its "breakneck", scrawling pattern, and the fact that it leaves yellow smears on the skin and clothing of anyone who touches it.
She also obsesses over the hatred she believes radiates from the room, supposing that it must have once been a nursery, and that the children who lived in it hated the wallpaper as much as she. She describes how the longer they stay in the bedroom, the more the wallpaper appears to mutate and change, especially in the moonlight.
