The Yellow Wallpaper

Based on Wikipedia: The Yellow Wallpaper

A woman crawls on all fours around a bedroom, stepping over her husband's unconscious body each time she passes it. She believes she has finally escaped—not through the door, but through the wallpaper itself.

This is how Charlotte Perkins Gilman's "The Yellow Wallpaper" ends. Published in January 1892, this short story has become one of the most celebrated works of American feminist literature and, simultaneously, one of the most unsettling pieces of horror fiction ever written.

The horror writer H.P. Lovecraft called it a classic that "subtly delineates the madness which crawls over a woman." The key word there is "crawls"—because by the story's conclusion, crawling has become the narrator's primary mode of existence.

The Story Itself

The narrative unfolds through journal entries written by an unnamed woman. Her physician husband, John, has rented a colonial mansion for the summer to help her recover from what he diagnoses as "temporary nervous depression—a slight hysterical tendency." This was a common diagnosis for women in the nineteenth century, a catch-all term that could mean almost anything.

John's prescribed treatment is rest. Complete rest. The narrator is forbidden from working, writing, or engaging in any mental stimulation whatsoever. She is confined to an upstairs room—a former nursery with barred windows, a gate at the top of the stairs, and a bed bolted to the floor.

The narrator notices these details but explains them away. The scratched and gouged floor? Children must have played there. The metal rings in the walls? More evidence of previous young occupants. She is an unreliable narrator, and Gilman uses this unreliability brilliantly to show us how the woman's mind works—and how it begins to unravel.

With nothing else to occupy her thoughts, the narrator becomes obsessed with the room's yellow wallpaper.

She describes its color as "sickly." She notes its "yellow smell." The pattern strikes her as bizarre and disturbing—"an interminable string of toadstools, budding and sprouting in endless convolutions." Where patches have been torn away, the paper leaves yellow smears on anything that touches it.

As days pass, the pattern seems to change, especially in moonlight. The narrator begins to see a figure within it. Eventually, she becomes convinced that a woman is trapped behind the wallpaper, creeping on all fours, trying to escape.

The narrator decides she must free this woman. She tears at the wallpaper, stripping it from the walls. When her husband finally breaks into the locked room, he finds his wife crawling along the baseboard, circling the room again and again.

"I've got out at last," she tells him, "in spite of you."

John faints. She keeps crawling, stepping over his body each time she completes another circuit.

The Woman Who Wrote It

Charlotte Perkins Gilman didn't invent this story from nothing. She lived a version of it.

After the birth of her first daughter, Gilman suffered what we would now recognize as postpartum depression. She sought treatment from Dr. Silas Weir Mitchell, the leading authority on women's mental health in late nineteenth-century America. Mitchell was famous for his "rest cure"—a treatment that prescribed bed rest, isolation, and a complete prohibition on intellectual activity. No reading. No writing. No painting. No work of any kind.

Gilman followed Mitchell's instructions for three months. She came close to a complete mental breakdown.

In desperation, she abandoned the treatment. She started working again, directly defying her doctor's orders. She survived.

Later, Gilman sought a second opinion from Dr. Mary Putnam Jacobi, one of the first female physicians in America and a vocal critic of the rest cure. Jacobi prescribed the opposite approach: physical and mental activity. This treatment actually worked.

Gilman wrote "The Yellow Wallpaper" as a warning. She exaggerated certain elements of her experience to make her point unmistakable. She sent a copy to Dr. Mitchell.

He never responded.

Gilman later claimed she heard that Mitchell changed his methods after reading her story. This turns out to be wishful thinking. Literary historian Julie Bates Dock has documented that Mitchell continued advocating for the rest cure until at least 1908—sixteen years after the story's publication. He even expressed interest in building entire hospitals devoted to his treatment methods.

Still, Gilman maintained that her story served its purpose. "It was not intended to drive people crazy," she wrote, "but to save people from being driven crazy, and it worked."

Why Doctors Silenced Women

To understand the story's power, you need to understand nineteenth-century medical attitudes toward women.

The word "hysteria" comes from the Greek "hystera," meaning uterus. For centuries, Western medicine attributed a vast range of women's mental and emotional conditions to a malfunctioning womb. The diagnosis was applied so broadly that it essentially meant "any mental health problem occurring in a female patient."

Medical authorities believed that women who engaged in serious intellectual pursuits—attending university, for instance—were overstimulating their brains. This overstimulation, they theorized, led to hysteria. The cure, logically, was to remove all mental stimulation.

There was an underlying assumption in all of this: women's mental illnesses stemmed from a lack of self-control. The physician's role was to impose that control externally. Medical texts from the period instructed doctors to "assume a tone of authority" with female patients. A "cured" woman was defined as one who had become "subdued, docile, silent, and above all subject to the will and voice of the physician."

The rest cure wasn't just a misguided treatment. It was a mechanism for social control.

Scholar Paula Treichler put it this way: diagnosis functioned to "empower the male physician's voice and disempower the female patient's." The narrator in "The Yellow Wallpaper" is never allowed to participate in her own treatment. Every suggestion she makes—that exercise might help, that socializing might help, that working might help—is dismissed. Her ideas are labeled irrational, and therefore she is deemed unqualified to have ideas about her own condition.

This is the domestic sphere in action. Women belonged in the home, in the nursery, behind wallpaper-covered walls. If they tried to escape, medicine would put them back.

The Question of Victory

Feminist scholars have debated for decades whether the story's ending represents triumph or defeat.

The obvious reading is tragic: the narrator has lost her mind. She believes she has become the woman in the wallpaper. She crawls on all fours like an animal. Her husband lies unconscious on the floor while she circles endlessly, trapped in a room she can no longer recognize as a prison.

But consider another interpretation.

Throughout the story, the narrator has been denied every form of agency. She cannot work, cannot write, cannot leave her room, cannot participate in decisions about her own health. Her husband speaks for her, thinks for her, determines what is real and what is not.

At the end, she has found a way out. Not a sane way. Not a healthy way. But a way.

"I've got out at last," she says. "In spite of you."

Her husband faints—the strong, rational man who has controlled everything now lies helpless on the floor. She crawls over him. Literally rises above him, even if only by inches. In a marriage where she felt utterly trapped, she has found a form of assertion, however devastating the cost.

This reading doesn't make the ending happy. It makes it something more complicated: a victory that is also a catastrophe, an escape that is also an imprisonment. The narrator has broken free of her husband's control by breaking her own mind.

The Wallpaper as Text

Professor Susan S. Lanser of Brandeis University offers a fascinating meta-interpretation of the story. She points out that the narrator, forbidden to read or write, begins to "read" the wallpaper instead.

Think about what the narrator does. She studies the wallpaper's contradictions—how it is simultaneously "flamboyant" and "dull," "pronounced" yet "lame." She tries to organize its patterns geometrically. She notices how it changes color in different light. She tracks its strange smell. She searches for meaning in its chaos.

This is what readers do with difficult texts.

The wallpaper becomes a kind of literature that the narrator can access even when all other reading material has been taken away. Within its impossible patterns, she finds "a space of text on which she can locate whatever self-projection." She finds the woman behind the paper—perhaps a version of herself, perhaps all women trapped by the same forces that trap her.

Lanser argues that the story itself was marginalized for decades for the same reasons the narrator was silenced. When the editor of the Atlantic Monthly rejected the story, he explained that he "could not forgive himself if he made others as miserable as he made himself" by reading it. The content was too disturbing, too offensive.

Yet similar arguments could be made about Edgar Allan Poe, whose horror stories remained canonical. The difference, Lanser suggests, was that "The Yellow Wallpaper" disturbed in a specifically gendered way. It exposed something that mainstream literary culture preferred not to examine.

Ghost Story or Something Worse

Horror author Alan Ryan introduced the story with a memorable observation: "Quite apart from its origins, it is one of the finest, and strongest, tales of horror ever written. It may be a ghost story. Worse yet, it may not."

That ambiguity is essential to the story's power.

If the woman in the wallpaper is a ghost—some previous occupant of the room who went mad and died there—then the story is supernatural horror. The narrator has made contact with something genuinely otherworldly, something that has possessed or consumed her.

But if the woman in the wallpaper is purely a product of the narrator's deteriorating mind, then the horror is entirely human. There are no monsters except the ones we create: the medical establishment that silences women, the husbands who imprison them with kindness, the society that defines half its population as naturally unstable.

Which reading is more frightening? A ghost you can perhaps exorcise, or a system you cannot escape?

Other Readings

Not all scholars accept the purely feminist interpretation of the story.

Historian Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz argues that "The Yellow Wallpaper" was primarily a cry against Gilman's first husband, the artist Charles Walter Stetson, rather than against Dr. Mitchell or the medical establishment in general. Horowitz examined Gilman's private journals, her drafts of poems and essays, her intimate letters. She compared these to Stetson's own diary entries.

What she found was a troubled marriage. Stetson demanded a traditional wife. He denied Charlotte personal freedom and dismissed her intellectual ambitions. The physician in the story—the husband who controls the narrator so completely—may be less a critique of medicine than a portrait of Walter Stetson himself.

Gilman may have deflected attention toward Mitchell to protect her daughter Katharine and Stetson's second wife, Grace Ellery Channing, who was also Gilman's close friend and cousin.

Another scholar, Sari Edelstein, reads the story as an allegory about yellow journalism—the sensationalist, scandal-driven newspaper culture that was emerging in Gilman's era. Gilman was frequently scandalized in the media and resented how the press exaggerated stories for flashy headlines. She later founded her own magazine, The Forerunner, in part to provide more thoughtful journalism.

In this reading, the wallpaper represents the press itself: sprawling, flamboyant, impossible to escape, covering everything with its yellow stain.

The Story's Afterlife

For decades after its publication, "The Yellow Wallpaper" was largely forgotten. It was rediscovered in the 1970s during the second wave of feminist criticism and quickly became a standard text in university curricula.

Today it is read as feminist literature, as Gothic horror, as psychological case study, as allegory. It appears in anthologies alongside Poe and Hawthorne. It has been adapted for film, theater, and opera.

The story endures because it captures something that remains true: the experience of being told that your perceptions are wrong, that your desires are symptoms, that the help being offered is the very thing destroying you.

The narrator of "The Yellow Wallpaper" is not allowed to name her own experience. Her husband names it for her: temporary nervous depression, a slight hysterical tendency. Her treatment is chosen for her. Her recovery is defined for her.

When she finally speaks for herself—"I've got out at last"—she has lost the ability to distinguish between freedom and madness.

That may be the most disturbing thing about the story. By the end, we cannot be sure either.

What It Means to Read This Now

More than a century after its publication, "The Yellow Wallpaper" continues to resonate because the dynamics it describes have not entirely disappeared.

Women's pain is still more likely to be dismissed as psychological rather than physical. Women's anger is still more likely to be pathologized. The phrase "hysterical woman" may have fallen out of medical usage, but its echoes persist in how female patients are sometimes treated, in whose symptoms are taken seriously and whose are attributed to anxiety or stress.

The story also speaks to anyone who has felt trapped by well-meaning help, anyone who has been told that the treatment making them worse is actually making them better, anyone who has been denied the authority to interpret their own experience.

Charlotte Perkins Gilman wrote a story about a woman who was not allowed to write. The irony is precise and intentional. The narrator's journal entries—the very text we are reading—are an act of defiance. She writes in secret, against doctor's orders, hiding her pages when her husband approaches.

Writing was Gilman's escape from the rest cure. It was her way out.

The narrator of the story finds a different escape, one that leads nowhere except in circles around a room, over and over, stepping across her husband's body.

Both women got out. Only one survived.