Book Review: The Yellow Wallpaper and Other Stories, by Charlotte Perkins Gilman (Dover Thrift Edition)

My Dover Thrift Edition copy of The Yellow Wallpaper and Other Stories, by Charlotte Perkins Gilman. (Photo by Mark C. Taylor)

Author Charlotte Perkins Gilman, 1860-1935.

I first read Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s 1892 short story “The Yellow Wallpaper” for an American Literature class in college. The professor for that class was Scottish, and I remember him saying “Reading ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’ is like reading the Yellow Wallpaper.” What he meant was that reading the story was the same as experiencing the story. But it was such a great quote that it’s stuck with me all of these years. I also remember my professor intertwining his hands and saying about “The Yellow Wallpaper,” “Do you see what she’s doing with the language here? Isn’t that creepy?” It sounds better in a Scottish accent, but it’s still ingrained in my brain that the language in “The Yellow Wallpaper” is “creepy.”  

“The Yellow Wallpaper” is a short story about a woman who has been prescribed the “rest cure,” a common diagnosis for women in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. And while certainly everyone needs a respite from the grueling demands of life now and then, the “rest cure” took this to an extreme, with the patient basically doing nothing at all, existing only in a waking coma-like state. Of course, this simply didn’t work very well, as doing nothing for weeks on end might make you completely insane, and in a worse state than when the treatment began.  

Written in the first person, “The Yellow Wallpaper” immerses the reader into the attic bedroom where the titular wallpaper becomes a focus of obsession for the narrator. It’s a masterful short story.  

Charlotte Perkins Gilman was a feminist writer who turned out a large number of short stories, novels, and nonfiction. Well-known during her lifetime, her writings languished in obscurity after her death in 1935 until she was rediscovered by feminist writers and critics in the 1960’s and 1970’s. The Dover Thrift edition of The Yellow Wallpaper and Other Stories collects 7 of Perkins Gilman’s short stories. It’s a quick read, at just 70 pages. I found my copy in a Little Free Library, and since I knew “The Yellow Wallpaper,” I thought I should read some of Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s other works.  

The other short stories in the book are all worth reading as well, even if none quite reach the heights of “The Yellow Wallpaper.” The other stories also deal with feminist concerns and were originally published between 1909 and 1914. It’s fascinating to read short stories that are more than a century old, but still feel very relevant. Of course, that might also be a sign that we have farther to go on gender equality than we’d like to acknowledge.  

In “If I Were a Man,” the main character suddenly finds herself occupying the body of her husband. One of her delights is that her clothes now have pockets. “These pockets came as a revelation. Of course she had known they were there, had counted them, made fun of them, mended them, even envied them; but she never had dreamed of how it felt to have pockets.” (p.58) As a man, pockets are one of the many things that I simply take for granted about the clothes I wear.  

One of my favorites of the other stories is “Turned,” about a woman whose husband has impregnated their maid. There’s a nice twist ending.  

The Yellow Wallpaper and Other Stories is a good budget introduction to the writings of Charlotte Perkins Gilman.