![]() Mitchell administered this cure of extended bed rest and isolation to intellectual, active white women of high social standing. Silas Weir Mitchell, late-nineteenth-century physician to the stars. The story is based on Gilman’s experiences with Dr. Reading “The Yellow Wall-Paper” felt like a mix of voyeurism and recognition, morphing into horror. The unnamed first-person narrator goes through a mental dance I knew well-the circularity and claustrophobia of an increasing depression, the sinking feeling that something wasn’t being told straight. The rest cure caused the illness it claimed to eliminate. She thinks she’s a creature who has emerged from the wallpaper. ![]() On the last day of the treatment, the narrator is completely mad. ![]() I loved the unnerving, sarcastic tone, the creepy ending, the clarity of its critique of the popular nineteenth-century “rest cure”-essentially an extended time-out for depressed women. When I first read “The Yellow Wall-Paper” years ago, before I knew anything about its author, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, I loved it. ![]()
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