The Yellow Wallpaper

Book summary

A young woman is taken by her physician husband to a summer house, to rest from a nervous condition that followed a birth. Forbidden to write or to work, she keeps a secret journal and spends her days in a room hung with yellow wallpaper. The pattern on the wall slowly takes up all her attention, and she believes she can see a shape moving behind it. The story explores domestic confinement, the rest cure and a medical authority that dismisses its patient. Gilman makes of it a short first-person text in which constraint becomes a nightmare.