Review
The unnamed narrator and her doctor husband, John, live in "a colonial mansion, a hereditary estate..." She believes the house is haunted. "John laughs at me, of course, but one expects that." She believes she is ill but her husband, and her brother, also a physician, say it is only "temporary nervous depression - a slight hysterical tendency..." They insist on "phosphates or phosphites - whichever it is - and tonics" and absolutely forbid work until she is well again. She believes "Personally...that congenial work, with excitement and change, would do me good. Personally, I disagree with their ideas. But what is one to do? I did write for a while in spite of them; but it does exhaust me a good deal - having to be so sly about it, or else meet with heavy opposition." She is confined to rest in a room she hates with wallpaper she finds hideously ugly: "The color is repellent, almost revolting: a smoldering unclean yellow... dull yet lurid orange in some places, a sickly sulphur tint in others." It is in this room that she writes her secret journal that is this story. She struggles to believe in her husband and brother's "kindness" and "care" while, with terrifying starkness, she narrates her journey into madness. -- For great reviews of books for girls, check out. -- From
Product Description
Based on the 1892 New England Magazine text, this teaching edition of The Yellow Wallpaper includes a generous selection of historical materials. The documents are organized into thematic units and features nineteenth-century advice manuals for young women and mothers; medical texts discussing the nature of women's sexuality; social reform literature concerning women's rights, the working classes, and immigration; and excerpts from periodicals, diaries, and writers' notebooks that give students a sense of the changing literary scene that Gilman entered. Editorial features designed to help students read the novel in light of the documents include a general introduction providing historical and cultural background, a chronology o Hawthorne's life and times, an introduction to each thematic group of documents, headnotes, extensive annotations, a generous selection of illustrations, and a selected bibliography.