The good news? This is how many haunted house tales begin. (She writes her account of what happens to her, and the effect it has on her, in secret, hiding her pen and paper when her husband or his sister come into the room.) Only one year separates ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’ from George Egerton’s first volume of short stories, which made similarly pioneering use of present-tense narration in order to depict female consciousness. You can read ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’ here before moving on to our summary and analysis below. So the narrator begins stripping the yellow wallpaper from the walls, much to the consternation of Jennie. Important information about Charlotte Perkins Gilman's background, historical events that influenced The Yellow Wallpaper, and the main ideas within the work. The Yellow Wallpaper Summary “The Yellow Wallpaper” is a short story by Charlotte Perkins Gilman that describes the narrator’s depression following the birth of her child. The Yellow Wallpaper Study Guide Next. He is the author of, among others, The Secret Library: A Book-Lovers’ Journey Through Curiosities of History and The Great War, The Waste Land and the Modernist Long Poem. It becomes clear, as the story develops, that depriving the female narrator of anything to occupy her mind is making her mental illness worse, not better. Second, because things are still unfolding seemingly before our very eyes, we feel that to attempt to pass judgment on what’s happening would be too rash and premature: we don’t know for sure how things are going to play out yet. Despondent, the narrator tells us how she is becoming more obsessed by the yellow wallpaper, especially at night when she is unable to sleep and so lies awake watching the pattern in the wallpaper, which she says resembles a fungus. Why else, wonders the story’s female narrator, would the house be available so cheaply unless it was haunted? In the last analysis, ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’ is so unsettling because it plays with established Gothic horror conventions and then subverts them in order to expose the misguided medical practices used in an attempt to ‘treat’ or ‘cure’ women who are suffering from mental or nervous disorders. And this will turn out to be true, in many ways – the story is often included in anthologies of horror fiction, and there is a ‘haunting’ of a kind going on in the story – but as ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’ develops we realise we’re reading something far more unsettling than a run-of-the-mill haunted house story, because the real ghosts and demons are either inside the narrator’s troubled mind or else her own husband and her sister-in-law. To summarise the story, then: the narrator and her husband John, a doctor, have come to stay at a large country house. Another way to prevent getting this page in the future is to use Privacy Pass. It has become a popular feminist text about the male mistreatment of women partly because the ‘villain’, the narrator’s husband John, is acting out of a genuine (if hubristic) belief that he knows what’s best for her. “The Yellow Wallpaper” remains one of the most disturbing books I’ve ever read. She becomes convinced that the ‘woman behind’ the yellow wallpaper is shaking it, thus moving the front pattern of the paper. Pingback: ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’: A Summary of Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Story – Interesting Literature. Jennie also does all of the cooking and housework. Excellent analysis! "The Yellow Wallpaper" is a short story by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, published 1892 in The New England Magazine. I love Angela Carter :). stricter). The narrator confides that she cannot even cry in her husband’s company, or when anyone else is present, because that will be interpreted as a sign that her condition is worsening – and her husband has promised (threatened?) However, the more likely reason is that she and John have noticed the narrator’s obsession with looking at the wallpaper, and are becoming concerned.). She starts to fear her husband. Perfect prep for Charlotte Perkins Gilman quizzes and tests you might have in school. She concludes that it is simply ‘a yellow smell!’ We now realise that the narrator is losing her mind rather badly. Next, the narrator tells us she has noticed the strange smell of the wallpaper, and tells us she seriously considered burning down the house to try to solve the mystery of what she smell was. The author of this article, Dr Oliver Tearle, is a literary critic and lecturer in English at Loughborough University. I will wait with abated breath for your thoughts! But there is another narrative advantage to this present-tense diary structure: we as readers are forced to appraise everything we are told by the narrator, and scrutinise it carefully, deciding whether we are being told the whole story or whether the narrator, in her nervous and unstable state, may not be seeing things as they really are. Terrific analysis. To summarise the story, then: the narrator and her husband John, a doctor, have come to stay at a large country house. Ruth Robbins has made the argument that the past tense (or ‘perfect tense’) is unsuited to some modes of fiction because it offers the ‘perspective that leads to judgment’: because events have already occurred, we feel in a position to judge the characters involved. The Yellow Wallpaper Summary. George Egerton’s first volume of short stories, The Secret Library: A Book-Lovers’ Journey Through Curiosities of History, The Great War, The Waste Land and the Modernist Long Poem, ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’: A Summary of Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Story – Interesting Literature. Performance & security by Cloudflare, Please complete the security check to access. Explanation of the famous quotes in The Yellow Wallpaper, including all important speeches, comments, quotations, and monologues. Cloudflare Ray ID: 5e9248bf18adecf2 She becomes paranoid that her husband and sister-in-law, Jennie, are trying to decipher the pattern in the yellow wallpaper, and she becomes determined to beat them to it. SparkNotes is brought to you by Barnes & Noble. ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’ is a Gothic horror story – it ends with the husband taking an axe to the bedroom door where his cowering wife is imprisoned … but the twist is that she has imprisoned herself in her deluded belief that she is protecting her husband from the ‘creeping women’ from behind the wallpaper, and he is prepared to beat down the door with an axe out of genuine concern for his sick wife, rather than to butcher her, Bluebeard or Jack Torrance style. She says she has seen this woman creeping about the grounds of the house during the day; she returns to behind the wallpaper at night. The story ends with her husband banging on the door to be let in, fetching the key when she tells him it’s down by the front door mat, and bursting into the room – whereupon he faints, at the sight of his wife creeping around the room. This inner/outer split is crucial to understanding the nature of the narrator’s suffering. You may need to download version 2.0 now from the Chrome Web Store. The whole field of nineteenth-century patriarchal society and the way it treats women thus comes under scrutiny, in a story that is all the more powerful for refusing to preach, even while it lets one such mistreated woman speak for herself. We’ll go over The Yellow Wallpaper summary, themes and symbols, The Yellow Wallpaper analysis, and some important information about the author. The narrator then outlines in detail how she sometimes sits for hours on end in her room, tracing the patterns in the yellow wallpaper. A good example of this is when, having told us at length how she follows the patterns on the yellow wallpaper on the walls of her room, sometimes for hours on end, the narrator then tells us she is glad her baby doesn’t have to live in the same room, because someone as ‘impressionable’ as her child wouldn’t do well in such a room. Through a series of short instalments, we learn more about the narrator’s situation, and her treatment at the hands of her doctor husband and her sister-in-law. Important quotes from Jennie Quotes in The Yellow Wallpaper. read it a few times in a row when I first crossed paths with it a few years ago –. From a general summary to chapter summaries to explanations of famous quotes, the SparkNotes The Yellow Wallpaper Study Guide has everything you need to ace quizzes, tests, and essays. Use up and down arrows to review and enter to select. As the story develops, we realise that the woman’s husband has brought her to the house in order to try to cure her of her mental illness (he has told her that repairs are being carried out on their home, which is why they have had to relocate to a mansion). The Yellow Wallpaper study guide contains a biography of Charlotte Perkins Gilman, literature essays, a complete e-text, quiz questions, major themes, characters, and a full summary and analysis. First, we are thrown in amongst the events, experiencing them as they happen almost, so we feel complicit in them. Thank you as always, Ken, for the thoughtful comment – and I completely agree about the links with Freud. Your IP: 52.60.148.141 We have some good news and we have some bad news when it comes to the narrator of "The Yellow Wallpaper."

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