Horror Short Stories: The Yellow Wallpaper

 It's not often that you'll come across fiction that deals with themes of mental health issues.

Published in 1892, The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, is a tale said in the first person.

The unnamed narrator is brought to a mansion by her husband John who is also a physician. She is kept in a room with yellow wallpaper and told to rest and eat properly because her husband thinks she is suffering from severe depression.

But the narrator isn't too keen on staying in a room where she feels like the yellow wallpaper has patterns that waver and dance.

She longs to write or to have visitors but her husband doesn't allow it.

He only comes to see her in the evening and the narrator claims that is the only time she has an appetite. The husband makes light of her statement and although he takes care of her still doesn't allow her to even go out on her own.

Some days later, the narrator thinks she sees a woman crawling on all fours behind the pattern. She's hiding, according to her, behind patterns that serve as her prison much like the narrator who feels trapped in a room with bars on windows and a sickly yellow wallpaper the only thing to look at.

More days pass and the narrator thinks the woman behind the pattern wants to escape the sickly yellow wallpaper which seems to have a "yellow" smell to it.

So the narrator begins to tear off the wallpaper, bit by bit. Her husband's sister who comes to visit also feels that the wallpaper torn around the room is peculiar and that the yellow from the wallpaper is coming off when touched.

The narrator is on a mission to free the woman she sees in the wallpaper and one day locks the room as she tears the wallpaper.

Her husband is beside himself and pleads to her to open it.

When she finally does, he is shocked to discover his wife rubbing herself on the wallpaper and the whole room in disarray.

The husband faints and the narrator keeps rubbing herself against the wallpaper and climbs over her husband as she follows it around the room.

The story brings forth a serious issue where a woman is belittled because of her ailment. Her husband thought he was doing the right thing by keeping her isolated but he clearly didn't see that forbidding his wife from doing all the things she loved was only damaging her mental health even more.

The narrator was getting lonelier by the day and perhaps imagined a woman like herself kept imprisoned in the wallpaper whose patterns she must have thought to be like bars of a cell.

Her own need to escape was undoubtedly projected on the woman she saw behind the patterns of the wallpaper. The narrator must have felt that if she freed the woman, she would be liberated too.

She did everything as her husband said, cut herself from the outside world, ate when she didn't feel like it and stayed in a room she didn't like much at first.

But in a way, she also saw her husband as her captor, as someone who undermined her and didn't respect her. And so, when she finally lets her husband enter in the last scene and he faints upon seeing her state, her first instinct isn't to tend to him. She's already lost in her madness where her husband needs to be defeated over and over so that she can be free to do whatever she wants.

If only the husband had allowed her visitors and let her write. Writing would have proved to be therapeutic for her. But her husband had unwittingly caged up all her emotions and thoughts until they manifested into insanity from which she may not recover.

The Yellow Wallpaper is a unique horror tale that spotlights how important it is to get proper therapy for mental issues. 

Scare Scale: 3.5/5