The Yellow Wallpaper and Other Stories in On Paths Unknown

Sep 28, 2011 Nandakishore Mridula rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: general-fiction

This story, while not conventionally "horror", is more terrifying than anything portraying ghosts and goblins. A tale of the mental breakdown of a woman, captured in excruciating detail from the protagonist's POV. One of the all-time gems of short fiction. ...more

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Sep 30, 2013 David rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: girls-girls-girls, short-stories, usa

Gilman's "The Yellow Wallpaper" can certainly be read on a number of levels. On the surface it is the stirring story of a woman descending deeper into a neurasthenic psychosis, chronicling her descent in a secret diary, but there are many other layers and angles which haunt Gilman's slim story.

There is the feminist angle, which is perhaps the most common strata of meaning employed in analysis of this short story, and one on which I will not dwell. In many ways it echoes Ibsen's Doll's House, wi Gilman's "The Yellow Wallpaper" can certainly be read on a number of levels. On the surface it is the stirring story of a woman descending deeper into a neurasthenic psychosis, chronicling her descent in a secret diary, but there are many other layers and angles which haunt Gilman's slim story.

There is the feminist angle, which is perhaps the most common strata of meaning employed in analysis of this short story, and one on which I will not dwell. In many ways it echoes Ibsen's Doll's House, with a perhaps more serious young woman as protagonist. John's diminutive treatment of his wife ("blessed little goose") is immediately redolent of Torvald's sobriquets for his wife ("squirrel," "lark") and their relationship is as much defined by husband-wife as it is by patient-doctor. The "woman in the wallpaper" is trapped and pinned down by the harsh conventions of feminine propriety, belittled and forced to "creep" when no one is looking, to shake the bars of her prison when she is left to herself.

But what struck me, perhaps more than the feminist angle, though it is perhaps less fully developed in my mind, is the madness of inspiration, of artistic creation. Our narrator is a writer "with [an] imaginative power and habit of story-making, a nervous weakness [which is] sure to lead to all manner of excited fancies." Put to bed rest and refused the escape of writing for its "intellectual work" the narrator slips and slips further away from herself, her creative and writerly self. The whole of the short story, which of course could be doubly fictive, the imagined story of our narrator, is her reconciliation of estranging society and country loneliness with her idea of Self. I am immediately reminded of James' The Turn of the Screw, where convention and suppression in the idyllic countryside drive a young woman over the mental brink. And like James' unnamed governess, our narrator here too has a very romantic imagination:

A colonial mansion, a hereditary estate, I would say a haunted house, and reach the height of romantic felicity -- but that would be asking too much of fate!

But in fact, the house is haunted. Or perhaps not the estate, but her house, her keep and chamber, her mind. She is haunted by her own creative impulses.

Another companion novella or short story, depending on your definition, is Maupassant's La Horla: the story of a man, also in a country house, haunted by something which ever escapes him, and is perhaps the brother story to Gilman's. I read in Maupassant, as I read here, the horror of inspiration: how it is horrible as well as it is beautiful. The ugly yellow wallpaper, the mysterious pattern, the seeming multi-layers of the pattern: our narrator can neither ignore them nor understand them, but has an ineluctable desire to decipher them: in fact she feels it is a mortal imperative: she must free that which is chained down beneath the horrible pattern of life. She writes in her diary, not to tell her unknown reader what lies beyond the horrid paper, but to discover in herself what it is: to chronicle her observations and to synthesize them, to reconcile her realities and unrealities, to reveal something which is both horrible and true. In Maupassant's La Horla, the male diarist admonishes:

Solitude is dangerous for active minds. We need men who can think and can talk, around us. When we are alone for a long time, we people space with phantoms.

This is precisely the case with our narrator in "The Yellow Wallpaper." For her health, her sanity, she requires communion: with visitors, yes, but ultimately she requires that auto-communion of writing, of an imaginative communion with the Self and the other Self, the self with lives in fiction, which is both real and unreal. It is this other Self which is trapped behind the wallpaper, who takes over writing in the final entry, who creeps around the room like a madwoman. The narrator's lonesomeness breeds in her a second Self, a companion which is a horror, which is an even meld of real and unreal. She is the consubstatial host of sanity and insanity, of the real and the unreal, of the Self and the Other. This Other is the body of the imagination, and it is freed, by her writing, and at the Pyrrhic expense of her self and sanity. ...more

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May 08, 2017 Chinook rated it really liked it

Shelves: feminism, 1001, america, parenthood

I can't seem to match my copy to one on Goodreads, but mine includes the stories "The Giant Wistaria," "According to Solomon," "The Boys and the Butter," "Her Housekeeper," "Martha's Mother," "A Middle-Sized Artist," "An Offender," "When I Was a Witch," "The Cottagette," "Making a Living," and "Mr. Robert Grey Sr."

I just finished the audiobook of The Yellow Wallpaper and Other Stories and I do not understand how it took me so long to finally getting around to reading Perkins. And for all that Th ...more

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Jun 06, 2016 Xandra rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: american, 1001-books, semi-autobiography, z-w, 1800-1899, short-stories

Excellent short story about a woman's descent into madness. Read it here. ...more

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Jul 23, 2016 Nikolaos rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

I intented to give this little gem of a story four stars when I was just a few pages in, but it builds up so wonderfuly and so creepily towards the end, that that elusive fifth star is well deserved.

It is rather a famous story and its subtext and meanings have been discussed to death, deservedly so - but even taken at face value as just another "weird story", it is superb. Highly recommended! ...more

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