The Yellow Wall-Paper and Other Writings

Chapter 1

The Yellow Wall-paper

It is very seldom that mere ordinary people like John and myself secure ancestral halls for the summer.

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!

Still I will proudly declare that there is something queer about it.

Else, why should it be let so cheaply? And why have stood so long untenanted?

John laughs at me, of course, but one expects that in marriage.

John is practical in the extreme. He has no patience with faith, an intense horror of superstition, and he scoffs openly at any talk of things not to be felt and seen and put down in figures.

John is a physician, and perhaps (I would not say it to a living soul, of course, but this is dead paper and a great relief to my mind ) perhaps that is one reason I do not get well faster.

You see he does not believe I am sick!

And what can one do?

If a physician of high standing, and one s own husband, assures friends and relatives that there is really nothing the matter with one but temporary nervous depression a slight hysterical tendency what is one to do?

My brother is also a physician, and also of high standing, and he says the same thing.

So I take phosphates or phosphites whichever it is, and tonics, and journeys, and air, and exercise, and am absolutely forbidden to work until I am well again.

Personally, I disagree with their ideas.

Personally, I believe that congenial work, with excitement and change, would do me good.

But what is one to do?

I did write for a while in spite of them; but it does exhaust me a good deal having to be so sly about it, or else meet with heavy opposition.

I sometimes fancy that in my condition if I had less opposition and more society and stimulus but John says the very worst thing I can do is to think about my condition, and I confess it always makes me feel bad.

So I will let

Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1860 1935) was a leading figure in the women s movement of the early twentieth century. Gilman s most famous work, The Yellow Wall-Paper, was based on her own experiences with postpartum depression and launched her into the national spotlight. Her subsequent work was built on her belief that women are not only the equal of men but in many ways their superiors. Gilman died in 1935 as the result of a breast cancer diagnosis. Having been diagnosed with inoperable breast cancer, she wrote that she preferred chloroform to cancer.

"The most original and challenging mind which the [women's] movement produced."
--Carrie Chapman Catt