The Yellow Wallpaper, by Charlotte Perkins Gilman

[landingtree]

This is a short story, but I read it in its own volume with afterword. I went in expecting a great feminist horror story, and it is one, and still worked given the expectation. I found it anger-producing but not unbearable (I think in a past year I picked it up and read the first few pages and went 'Not today'.)

The story's narrator is being encouraged by her husband to remain, for her health, in a room she dislikes, doing nothing; a room with curious furnishings, and even more curious wallpaper. There's a great efficiency of implication throughout. "John laughs at me, of course," writes the narrator on the first page, "but one expects that in marriage." This is about when I started going 'aaaaaaaaa' internally, and I did not stop until some time after the end.

...

The odd thing about the afterword, which fills in details of Gilman's own life (she herself was treated by the psychiatrist she names in the novel, for a depression he diagnosed as stemming from her work, but which abated noticeably in the absence of her husband), is that it doesn't talk at all about ghosts. Whereas by the story's second paragraph, the narrator is joking about whether she's in a haunted house, and I'm very much inclined to think she is.

Comments

[kore]

One of the great Gothic Girl Meets House stories! Or rather, Girl Meets Wallpaper.

[landingtree]

As a kid I had a no-kidding dread of wallpaper for several months due to being inexplicably freaked out by the sentence, "The dry, musty, dusty wallpaper" in a Terry Pratchett book. I think if someone had given me this story then, I probably would not have understood it, but also I might still be recovering to this day.

[leaflemming]

Now I'm bouncing back and forth between trying to visualise the wallpaper we had when you were small, and imagining how this fear might have synergised with the emotions aroused by reading The Wolves in the Walls.

[(Anonymous)]

I think this must have happened in the Goldfish House? This was Men at Arms, and I didn’t start reading adult discworld myself for a wee while. Also it’s the room I vaguely recall having the feelings in. Prompted one of our first conversations about the horror/dread distinction, since I remember deciding that the wallpaper would have been much less scary if it had done anything. (Mind you, Men at Arms is the one where various inanimate objects become suspected as murder weapons so I suspect that helped).

I forgot that I was scared of The Wolves in the Walls! Vague memories surface now.

[landingtree]

Oh, that was me of course

[leaflemming]

I assumed!

Are these vague memories vague enough that you might be inventing them in response to my comment? Because I remember you having a range of unique-to-you fears, but not actually that one. I was only free-associating from your post, and thinking how well those fears could have worked together.

[landingtree]

They absolutely are vague enough - in fact I wondered about that! (I have a sense that the art unsettled me, but even that is uncertain, perhaps mingling with memories of other books).

[sartorias]

I've seen that house. Not far from Benedict Arnold's house--which got turned into a hippie pad in the sixties or seventies.

[landingtree]

Oh, huh! I knew some of the circumstances were from life, but I didn’t know the house was.