The Yellow Wallpaper

I love this book first and foremost because it is essentially the OG of madwomen narratives. Written in 1892, it is a super-creepy, sensory, trippy exploration of one woman’s sanity slowly being shredded by male medical “expertise”—in this case, a doctor’s prescription for postpartum depression: utter isolation in a bedroom with no intellectual stimulation... in order to alleviate postpartum depression (?!). Unsurprisingly, rather than “recovering,” the heroine drags readers down a terrifying rabbit hole of hallucination, self-destruction, and—ultimately—murder.

It’s a masterful, Hitchcockian deep dive into psychosis written over a half-century before Psycho. But it’s also an extremely satisfying example… show more.

This book unleashed my interest in gothic literature, and soon after, I wrote my book.

I enjoy the way the narrative begins innocently and picks up momentum. Racing to the ending like a runaway train. I did something similar in my book with the pacing. Stetson's novella feels so much more prominent in scope than a novella. What makes this gothic is that it captures the deterioration of a woman into madness, in much the same way Edgar Allen Poe did with his male protagonist in The Raven.

You can read Stetson's novella for free. It's in the public domain. 

I fell in love with The Yellow Wallpaper in high school. It is one of the earliest, if not only, stories we were reading about a woman’s mental health. The protagonist is depressed but is not taken seriously by her husband. He locks her away and ridicules her worries. She goes mad and becomes part of the wallpaper that first disturbed her. 

What first caught my attention is that she is not allowed any mental stimulation including reading and writing. It speaks to society’s expectations of women – they should be content with being wives and mothers, and nothing more.

This is a quick read, but it’s one that will leave an impression. A young woman, suffering from a malady described as a “temporary nervous depression,” is instructed by her husband to get into bed – and stay there until she has recovered. This was the famous “rest cure” touted by early twentieth-century physicians as the solution to all manner of women’s psychological maladies. As Gilman skillfully narrates in this fictional tale, the rest cure was not all it was chalked up to be. By the end of the story, the protagonist isn’t sure what’s real and what she’s simply… show more.