The Yellow Wallpaper

The CampfireThe openingFree

This is from a secret journal. A young woman wrote it, in the summer, in a big old house her husband rented for the season.

Her husband, John, is a doctor. She has just had a baby, and she's been sad, tired, nervous. John says it's nothing serious. Just a "slight hysterical tendency." The cure, he says, is rest. Complete rest. No work, no writing, no visitors, no excitement.

So she isn't supposed to be writing this journal. She has to hide it.

They have taken a room at the top of the house for her. It used to be a nursery, John says. It has bars on the windows, for the children. There are rings in the walls. The bed is nailed to the floor.

And the walls are covered in yellow wallpaper.

She hates the wallpaper at once.

It's a sickly, sulfurous yellow, faded in some places, torn off in big strips in others. The pattern is a mess of curves and lines that go nowhere. If you follow a line with your eyes, it suddenly turns and goes back on itself, or ends in a strange angle, and you lose it.

John laughs at her for hating it. He won't change rooms. He says she must not give in to fancies.

So she lies in bed all day, looking at the wallpaper. There's nothing else to do.