Reading “The Yellow Wall-Paper” felt like a mix of voyeurism and recognition, morphing into horror. The unnamed first-person narrator goes through a mental dance I knew well-the circularity and claustrophobia of an increasing depression, the sinking feeling that something wasn’t being told straight. The rest cure caused the illness it claimed to eliminate. She thinks she’s a creature who has emerged from the wallpaper.
On the last day of the treatment, the narrator is completely mad. I loved the unnerving, sarcastic tone, the creepy ending, the clarity of its critique of the popular nineteenth-century “rest cure”-essentially an extended time-out for depressed women. When I first read “The Yellow Wall-Paper” years ago, before I knew anything about its author, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, I loved it.
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