The Yellow Wallpaper

The Yellow Wallpaper (1892) recounts the experience of a woman subjected to a strict rest cure after a nervous crisis, confined to a room whose unsettling yellow wallpaper becomes the obsessive focus of her gaze. Isolated from intellectual activity and deprived of autonomy, the protagonist begins to perceive ambiguous shapes and presences within the wallpaper’s patterns, as though they were coming to life.

Charlotte Perkins Gilman crafts a tale of mounting psychological tension that transcends mere horror to denounce female oppression and the constraints imposed by a patriarchal society. Suspended between Gothic fiction and clinical study of the mind, The Yellow Wallpaper is a brief yet powerful work that explores the fragility of sanity and the silent violence of confinement.