How could I not have ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’ on the list. It is an important story, graphically illustrating the inhumane treatment of the mental health of women at the end of the 19th century. This is another piece where the way it’s told is essential. A masterclass in storytelling, this unreliable narrator has woven her tragic ‘rest cure’ into our hearts. The image of a woman trapped behind the pattern in the wallpaper is so strong and chilling, as the narrator herself gradually inhabits that woman. I can’t get her out of my head, creeping, creeping around the room, scraping at the walls with her broken fingernails, gouging at the paper, tearing it off in strips.
“I’ve got out at last … and you can’t put me back. Now why should that man have fainted? But he did, and right across my path by the wall, so that I had to creep over him every time!”
The ‘rest cure’ that is forced on the narrator, forbidding her to work, is an echo of Gilman’s own doctor who treated the author’s nervous exhaustion by advising her to lead as domestic a life as possible, and “never touch pen, brush or pencil for as long as she should live.” It’s enough to make a writer’s blood boil.
First published in 1892 in the New England Magazine. It has been widely anthologised and republished, including in The Yellow Wallpaper and Selected Writings, Virago, 2009. It is available to read online here
A Personal Anthology 