The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman: Free EPUB, AZW3 & KEPUB Download
The Yellow Wallpaper
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The Yellow Wallpaper opens:
It is very seldom that mere ordinary people like John and myself secure ancestral halls for the summer.
A colonial mansion, a hereditary estate, I would say a haunted house, and reach the height of romantic felicity-but that would be asking too much of fate!
Still I will proudly declare that there is something queer about it.
A colonial mansion three miles from the village, let cheaply and long untenanted, and a husband who calls the feeling a draught. Download the complete story.
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~6,000 words (estimated)
Approx. 20 minutes
Standalone
A rented colonial mansion three miles from the village, and the old nursery at the top of the house, with bars on the windows, rings in the walls and yellow wallpaper
7 movements
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0.22 MB (EPUB) · 0.25 MB (AZW3) · 0.22 MB (KEPUB)
Public domain in the United States
Project Gutenberg #1952
An unnamed woman comes to a colonial mansion for the summer with her husband John, a physician of high standing, who has diagnosed temporary nervous depression and prescribed a schedule for every hour of the day, plenty of air, tonics, and no work of any kind. She writes in secret instead. The room she is given is the old nursery, with bars on the windows and rings set in the walls for gymnasium ropes, and the wallpaper is a sprawling flamboyant pattern that she calls a committal of every artistic sin. By August she has stopped asking to be taken away, and the pattern has begun to move.
Charlotte Perkins Gilman wrote the story in 1890, three years after her own rest cure under the Philadelphia neurologist S. Weir Mitchell, and The New England Magazine printed it in January 1892. It has no chapters and almost no plot in the ordinary sense: a diary, a room, a husband who is kind and certain, and a woman whose account of what she sees is the only account anyone has. The horror is administrative rather than supernatural, which is why the last page still reads as an indictment. See Wikipedia’s article on The Yellow Wallpaper for its publication history. The text is available via Project Gutenberg #1952.
The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman: Summary, Characters & Themes
This page is a summary and analysis of The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, with the historical context, the characters, the themes, seven movement summaries and the free download links. The story is a diary kept in secret by a woman whose name is never given. Her husband John, a physician of high standing, has brought her to a colonial mansion three miles from the village for the summer, on a three months rental, and has diagnosed temporary nervous depression, a slight hysterical tendency. Her brother, also a physician, agrees with him. The house was let cheaply and has stood untenanted for years, something about heirs and co-heirs; there are hedges and gates that lock, and the room she is given is the old nursery at the top of the house, with bars on the windows. She writes whenever John is away, and hides the paper when he comes back.
The author is Charlotte Perkins Gilman, and the text of The Yellow Wallpaper itself has a long critical history. She was born in Hartford, Connecticut, in 1860, into a New England family of clergymen and reformers, was educated in Providence and at the Rhode Island School of Design, and supported herself and her daughter by teaching, drawing and writing. The story is close enough to her own life that she said so in print. In 1887, after the birth of her daughter Katharine, she collapsed and was sent to S. Weir Mitchell’s rest cure in Philadelphia, where she was told to live as domestic a life as possible and never to touch pen, brush or pencil again. She wrote the story in 1890, in part as an argument with that prescription, and later sent a copy of it to Mitchell himself.
The method is a diary that keeps being interrupted. There comes John, and I must put this away, he hates to have me write a word. The narrative advances by concealment: writing while Jennie is out, watching the road from a window, sliding the notebook under the mattress when anyone climbs the stairs. Against that, the wallpaper is described with an attention no other object in the book receives, and the description is oddly professional. She knows a little of the principle of design, and she knows this thing was arranged on no law of radiation, alternation, repetition or symmetry she ever heard of. The room is measured, the pattern followed by the hour, and the domestic detail stays exact: the schedule for every hour, the phosphates, the cod-liver oil, the ale and rare meat, the visit of mother and Nellie and the children for the Fourth of July. The entries are short and undated, so the summer is measured by the pattern rather than the calendar.
Then the sub-pattern surfaces. In certain lights, where the paper has not faded, a formless sort of figure sulks behind the silly and conspicuous front design; at night the outside pattern becomes bars, and by August the figure is a woman stooping down and creeping, with her hands on the bars, shaking them. The second half of the story is a negotiation with her. The narrator stops asking to leave, eats better, sleeps a good deal in the daytime and lies awake at night watching, and the diary’s excuses grow more elaborate as the entries grow shorter. She notices the long smudge near the mopboard, a straight even mark running behind every piece of furniture except the bed, as if it had been rubbed over and over, and the smell, which she calls a yellow smell and thinks seriously of burning the house to reach.
Gilman never lets the reader settle whether the wallpaper is haunted, and the last page refuses the easy reading. The woman is not visited on the narrator; she is peeled out, by the narrator’s own hands, in a strip about as high as her head and half around the room. She locks the door, throws the key down into the front path, ties herself with a rope that Jennie never found, and tells John through the door that she has got out at last, in spite of him and Jane. He faints across her path, and she creeps over him every time she crosses it. The text used here is the complete Project Gutenberg transcription (#1952). Readers who want the same pressure at greater length should try Carmilla, and for a governess with the same problem of being believed, The Turn of the Screw.
Historical Context
Silas Weir Mitchell (1829-1914) was the Philadelphia neurologist whose rest cure Gilman underwent in 1887, and the name in the story is his. His regimen for nervous women was isolation, bed rest, overfeeding, massage and the removal of all intellectual work, and it was designed for patients who could afford a nurse and a darkened room. The advice Gilman remembered, and quoted for the rest of her life, was to live as domestic a life as possible, to have but two hours of intellectual life a day, and never to touch pen, brush or pencil again. The story takes the prescription at its word and shows what it looks like from inside the bedroom: a schedule, a nurse, and a rule against writing.
Gilman wrote the story in June 1890 and sent it first to the Atlantic Monthly, where Horace Scudder returned it, saying he could not forgive her for making him so miserable. She placed it instead with The New England Magazine, which printed it in January 1892, and it was collected in 1899 in a volume called The Yellow Wallpaper, published in Boston by Small, Maynard. The magazine text is short, and its first readers took it as a case study rather than a ghost story. It then went quiet for the better part of a century. The Feminist Press edition of 1973, with an afterword by Elaine Hedges, put it back in print and into the syllabus.
Gilman spent the rest of her life as a lecturer, editor and social theorist. Women and Economics (1898) argued that women’s economic dependence on men was the mechanism of their subjection; The Man-Made World (1911) and the novel Herland (1915), about a country with no men in it, carried the argument into fiction; and from 1909 to 1916 she wrote and published The Forerunner, a monthly magazine in which she serialised her own work, including the 1913 essay Why I Wrote The Yellow Wallpaper. She married her cousin George Houghton Gilman in 1900 and died in 1935. Her writing also carries the eugenic assumptions common to her generation of progressives, and the modern reader meets them in Herland and in her sociology.
Key Characters & Literary Archetypes
- The narrator: unnamed, the only voice in the book. She keeps the diary against a household that treats writing as a symptom, hides it when John or Jennie comes upstairs, reports her decline with a precision no one else shares. She measures the room, counts the breadths that failed to match, and notices the smell and the smudge. Her last line, that she has got out at last in spite of you and Jane, is the only place a name is given her, and it is given as a reproach.
- John: a physician, practical in the extreme, with no patience for faith, an intense horror of superstition, and an open contempt for any talk of things not to be felt and seen and put down in figures. He loves her, carries her upstairs when she cries, calls her a blessed little goose, and refuses to repaper the room because the wallpaper is only a fancy. His certainty is the story’s engine: I am a doctor, dear, and I know, he says, and the sight of her creeping is enough to make him faint.
- Jennie: John’s sister, the enthusiastic housekeeper who hopes for no better profession and is sure the writing is what made her sister-in-law ill. She is affectionate and watchful, and she is also the household’s second pair of eyes: the narrator catches her with her hand flat on the wallpaper and frightens her into anger. Her explanation, that the paper stains everything it touches, that there are yellow smooches on all their clothes, sounds innocent, and is not accepted. She offers to sleep in the room, is refused, and laughs at the torn wall.
- Mary: the nurse who has charge of the baby, and the reason the nursery can be emptied of its child. She appears in a handful of sentences, always as a competence the narrator cannot replace: it is fortunate Mary is so good with the baby. Because Mary is there, the narrator can be alone in the upstairs room all day, the condition both of her rest and of her obsession. Mary does the one job the story’s economy depends on, and is never given a line of dialogue or an opinion about the wallpaper.
- The woman behind the pattern: first a formless shape in the sub-pattern, visible only in certain lights; then a stooped figure who creeps and shakes the bars of the front design; then, by day, a woman in the garden, in the grape arbors, hiding under the blackberry vines when a carriage comes. She is always creeping, and most women do not creep by daylight. Whether she is a ghost, a hallucination or the narrator’s own image is left open; she never speaks, and is described only in the narrator’s words.
- The baby: present as a fact and never as a scene. He is a dear baby, and the narrator cannot be with him because it makes her so nervous; he is well and happy with Mary, and he does not have to occupy the nursery. Her relief at that is one of the story’s coldest sentences, followed at once by the thought that she would not have a child of her own, an impressionable little thing, live in such a room for worlds, and that she can stand it so much easier than a baby.
Core Literary Themes
- The cure as confinement: the rest cure is administered as kindness and functions as a sentence. John’s schedule takes the care from her, the nursery has bars for children, the room is at the top of the house, and the one activity that relieves her, writing, is the one thing forbidden. Gilman’s argument is precise: the treatment produces the symptoms it is meant to cure. Deceit, secrecy, sleeplessness and the habit of lying still all arrive with the regimen, and the narrator names the mechanism herself when she says that if she had less opposition and more society and stimulus she might be better. Nobody in the story is cruel, which is the point.
- Writing as the forbidden act: the diary is a crime committed in daylight, and the story is the evidence. She writes on dead paper because it is a relief to say what she thinks in some way, and the entries shorten as the effort grows greater than the relief. The wallpaper becomes the other text she reads, with a front pattern and a sub-pattern, a design to be followed to a conclusion, and the two activities meet in the last movement, when she stops describing the wall and starts tearing it. The story’s form is its argument: a first-person document that no one in the household is allowed to see.
- Pattern, order and the domestic scheme: the wallpaper is the household’s own design writ large. It is not arranged on any law of radiation, alternation, repetition or symmetry that she knows, it repeats only across the breadths, and when you think you have mastered it, it turns a back somersault. John’s world runs on figures and a schedule for every hour; Jennie’s runs on housekeeping and clean clothes; the paper runs on the same principles of order and defeats every attempt to read it. Her exhaustion at following the pattern is the exhaustion of following the marriage, and the story makes the two disorders the same shape.
- The double, and the rule about daylight: the woman in the wall is the narrator’s own image, and her behaviour is written in the language of etiquette rather than horror. Creeping by daylight is humiliating, so the narrator locks the door before she does it; a carriage on the road sends the woman under the blackberry vines; the moon, when it comes, turns the pattern into bars. Night and day reverse what they should do, since the figure is subdued and quiet by daylight and shaking the bars by moonlight. The doubling is not a visitation from outside; it is a division of labour inside one woman.
- Naming, expertise and the counter-diagnosis: everyone in the story has a title except the narrator. John is a physician, her brother is a physician, Jennie is the housekeeper, Mary is the nurse, and Weir Mitchell waits in the fall as the final authority. Against that wall of qualification she offers a hypothesis of her own, delivered as a joke and then seriously, that perhaps it is the paper, and she is right. The story’s most unsettling move is to let the patient’s diagnosis be the accurate one while the professionals call it a false and foolish fancy, and to leave the single appearance of her name, Jane, on the last page as a thing said in reproach.
Why Download Our Custom E-Reader Edition of The Yellow Wallpaper?
This edition is the whole story and nothing else: 6,052 words in a single file, from the first sentence about ancestral halls to the last about creeping over John. Nothing has been modernised, no paragraph has been cut, and the diary’s interruptions stay where Gilman put them, so the sentences that break off when John comes upstairs still break off. The text follows the Project Gutenberg transcription, which reproduces the 1892 printing, and the punctuation stays as printed, including the long run of dashes in which the narrator thinks aloud and corrects herself mid-sentence.
The download comes in three formats from this one page: EPUB for most readers, AZW3 for older Kindles, and KEPUB for Kobo devices. Each file is a single readable section with a linked table of contents, so the story opens where you left it, and the short unnumbered entries make it easy to read a few pages and put it down. There is no DRM, no account and no software to install beyond the reader you already use: the file goes onto the device and stays there, and a phone will open it as readily as a laptop.
The notes above are meant for a second reading as much as a first. They cover the rest cure and the Philadelphia doctor standing behind John, the writing of 1890 and the magazine printing of January 1892, the 1973 reprint that brought the story back into print, and the seven movements into which an unchaptered text can usefully be divided. The questions at the end deal with the things readers ask most often: what the woman in the wallpaper is, whether the narrator has a name, and what the last sentence is doing with the word Jane.
- Project Gutenberg transcription, via Project Gutenberg #1952 — the complete text, unabridged, with no chapter divisions because the story has none.
- Unabridged Every paragraph kept, including the passages that break off mid-sentence when John comes up the stairs.
- Made for reading One readable section with a linked table of contents, in the order Gilman printed it and with her punctuation left alone.
- Made for e-readers EPUB, AZW3 and KEPUB files, each with a linked table of contents and no DRM of any kind.
- Carmilla — free EPUB, AZW3 & KEPUB
- The Turn of the Screw — free EPUB, AZW3 & KEPUB
- The King in Yellow — free EPUB, AZW3 & KEPUB
Chapter summaries
The Yellow Wallpaper has no chapters and no numbered entries. The seven movements below follow the diary in order, from the rented house to the locked room, and they quote the sentences that mark each turn.
- I. The house, and John’s rules: The diary begins with the house: a colonial mansion three miles from the village, let cheaply and long untenanted, with hedges, gates that lock, and a legal quarrel among heirs that has left it empty. The narrator says at once that there is something queer about it. John laughs, diagnoses temporary nervous depression, and prescribes phosphates, tonics, journeys, air, exercise and no work. She is given the upstairs nursery, with bars on the windows, and told that air is the one thing she can absorb all the time. She begins writing in secret, and the first entry is interrupted.
- II. The room, and the paper: The wallpaper gets its full description in one sustained paragraph: sprawling and flamboyant, committing every artistic sin, a smouldering unclean yellow strangely faded by the slow-turning sunlight, and curves that commit suicide at outrageous angles. She had asked for the room downstairs with roses and was refused. John will not repaper, because that would mean giving way to a fancy, and after the paper it would be the heavy bedstead, then the barred windows, then the gate at the head of the stairs. She notes the paper is torn off in patches as far as she can reach.
- III. Jennie, and the Fourth of July: Writing becomes a smuggled habit. Jennie, John’s sister and the household’s housekeeper, thinks it was the writing that made her ill, so the notebook goes under the mattress whenever footsteps come up the stairs and the narrator keeps watch on the road from a window. Mother and Nellie and the children come for a week over the Fourth of July. John threatens Weir Mitchell in the fall. She cries at nothing and sleeps badly, then the sub-pattern appears: a strange, provoking, formless figure sulking behind the front design, visible only in certain lights.
- IV. The pattern, followed for hours: She lies on the nailed-down bed and traces the pattern to a conclusion, and cannot. It is not built on any law of radiation, alternation or repetition; the breadths repeat, but nothing else does. She calls it a debased Romanesque with delirium tremens, and the toadstool comparison, budding and sprouting in endless convolutions, is as close as she gets. The pattern lolls like a broken neck with two bulbous eyes staring upside down, and one place where two breadths failed to match sends the eyes up and down the room. She is never asleep when John thinks she is.
- V. The smell, and the woman behind: Two things arrive together: the smell and the woman. A week of fog and rain makes the smell inescapable, in the dining room, the parlor, the hall, on the stairs, calls it a yellow smell and thinks seriously of burning the house to reach it. Watching by moonlight she sees that the front pattern moves, and that the woman behind it shakes it, taking hold of the bars in the shady spots and keeping still in the bright ones. By daylight the woman is subdued, and then visible from every window, creeping and hiding under the blackberry vines.
- VI. Creeping, and the paper comes off: The narrator copies her. She locks the door to creep by daylight, because at night John would suspect something at once, and she says she does not want anybody to get that woman out at night but herself. She starts on the top pattern, meaning to take it off little by little. The last day comes: John stays in town, Jennie offers to sleep in the room and is refused. In the moonlight she runs to help, and between them they peel off yards of paper, a strip as high as her head and half around the room.
- VII. The locked room: Jennie finds the wall and is told it was done out of spite; she laughs and says she would not mind. The furniture goes downstairs, the servants go, and the narrator stays, since no one else may touch the paper. She locks the door, throws the key into the front path, and finds the rope. She cannot move the nailed bed, bites a corner and hurts her teeth, then peels all she can reach. When John gets in, she says she has got out at last in spite of him and Jane, and he faints across her path.
The Yellow Wallpaper: Frequently Asked Questions
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Part of: Gothic & Horror · Classic Fiction
