Charlotte Perkins Gilman, ca. 1900. Photo: C. F. Lummis. Restoration by Adam Cuerden. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.
When I first read “The Yellow Wall-Paper” years ago, before I knew anything about its author, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, I loved it. I loved the unnerving, sarcastic tone, the creepy ending, the clarity of its critique of the popular nineteenth-century “rest cure” essentially an extended time-out for depressed women. The story had irony, urgency, anger. On the last day of the treatment, the narrator is completely mad. She thinks she’s a creature who has emerged from the wallpaper.
The rest cure caused the illness it claimed to eliminate. Beautifully clear.