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.