"The Yellow Wallpaper"

Charlotte Perkins Gilman wrote this story over a period of years, from 1890 to 1894, and she would later refer to these as the hardest years of her life. She had a nervous breakdown and left her first husband and child to live alone in California. During this period, she also started to give lectures on freedom for women and socialism. She kept a boardinghouse, taught school, and edited newspapers. Her husband married her best friend, and Gilman relinquished her child to them. The tone of the story can be attributed to the difficulties and tensions in her own life, and it is possible to read this story as a projection of her own fears and

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ve some other secret which sets it apart. Her husband laughs at these ideas, but it is clear that he often laughs at her ideas and treats her as someone who is foolish and in need of protection rather than heeding. From the beginning, it is also clear that this woman is at odds with her husband and "nurse," for she says several times that her husband laughs at her, or that she disagrees that she should be confined to bed, or that she feels she is strong enough to work while the other two do not think she is. The tone of the story changes. In the beginning, the woman expresses the feeling that she could work and that the others are wrong for stopping her, but she is not overly critical of them for their view. She says she disagrees: "But what is one to do?" (531). She does get tired of having to write when they are not looking, and she agrees that it is better not to think about her condition. As the story progresses, however, she becomes more resentful of having to be so secretive, while at the same time she seems to want to keep her secrets more because those secrets are so personal and so strange. She does not want to tell anyone about the woman behind the wallpaper, and in fact she does not want anyone else to see the
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Approximate Word count = 1687
Approximate Pages = 7 (250 words per page)

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