I recently bought a copy of ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’ by Charlotte Perkins Gilman after hearing many of my favorite BookTubers talk about it. It’s a short story about mental illness. A woman becomes obsessed with the yellow wallpaper in a mansion she and her husband have rented to help her to recover from her ‘sadness’. The Vintage Classics edition I got has a total of 10 short stories by Gilman. There are other editions by Penguin, including the Penguin Little Black Classics edition, that has three stories or a completely different selection of stories by Gilman that includes The Yellow Wallpaper but not necessarily the stories that are in the collection I bought. 

But I recommend the Vintage Classic ‘Weird Girls’ edition because you get a complete feel of the author’s body of work. Gilman was born in 1860 and she was a journalist who wrote many works of fiction and non-fiction. She died by suicide–taking an overdose of chloroform–after being diagnosed with incurable breast cancer in 1932. Her work reflects her melancholy attitude towards life and is, at times, a little too bleak for my liking. But she was definitely an author ahead of her times, writing about what would have back then been radical ideas of change, resistance, and gender equality. Reading her stories today might feel commonplace, especially since mental health and gender issues are openly discussed, but we would do well to remember that these stories were written in the late 1800s when many of these ideas were far-fetched and even revolutionary.  

The Yellow Wallpaper dissects a woman’s descent into madness and her family’s role in it. The Rocking Chair is your average horror story as is The Giant Wisteria. Both of these are well written and executed but you feel like you have watched many such plots on different OTT platforms. I enjoyed a seemingly innocuous story about a housewife who goes on about her day without a free minute, catering to all the needs of her family without thinking about her own. This story made me dwell on how little attention we give to homemakers and their contribution in men’s successes in the professional arena. Challenging societal conventions on what it means to be a woman in a man’s world is another of Gilman’s stories, Mrs Elder’s Idea, where an aging woman who has always followed her husband’s orders finally decides to live life on her own terms. 

Every story in the collection I got from Pilgrims Book House in Jhamsikhel, Lalitpur, are ideas you are familiar with but don’t give much thought to on a daily basis. They shed light on mental illness, gender disparity, parenthood and its challenges, and many other issues. Gilman’s stories are a bit gothic and unsettling but the ideas presented in them make them worth your time. 

The Yellow Wallpaper

Charlotte Perkins Gilman

Published: Originally published in 1891

Publisher: Vintage Classics (Weird Girls edition)

Pages: 127, Paperback