I picked up this book in a bundle of chapbooks in April 2024. These little chapbooks, especially the non-poetry ones, have to fit in a certain place in my reading schedule: Mostly, when I finish a book with a couple of hours before bed and when I don’t want to dive back into the growing stack of my incompletely read books beside the chair. As it happens, this week I had just such an opening after finishing National Lampoon’s Jokes Jokes Jokes.
This story–it is a short story in a single volume, saddle-stitched–originally appeared in The New England Magazine in January 1892. The fact that it has been reprinted in 2018 indicates that it has some value to professors somewhere, and apparently, according to my research (reading Wikipedia) indicates it’s “is regarded as an important early work of American feminist literature for its illustration of the attitudes towards the mental and physical health of women in the 19th century. It is also lauded as an excellent work of horror fiction.”
Re-eee-ally.
I mean, it is a horror story: A doctor takes his wife to a quiet home for three months because she’s exhibiting some, I dunno, depression, and she’s in a big old house with him and someone to help, and she stays in a large room on the top floor that looks kind of like a nursery but with some scarring and damage. The room has the eponymous yellow wallpaper, which disturbs the woman further. Although they tell her she’s doing better, she feels more lethargic as the story goes on, and she starts seeing people in the gardens below and a woman trapped in the wallpaper, and as they are readying to depart, she embraces her madness.
There you go: Embracing madness as female empowerment.
My research (reading Wikipedia) indicates that this story might be a little autobiographical (presumably without the embracing madness part), and that the author was speaking against “The Rest Cure” which I guess what they did when well-to-do women in the late 19th century showed some of the less florid mental illnesses (meloncholy, lethargy, and so on). So the author was probably dinging something near to her heart and very contemporary, and somehow that has spoken to over a hundred years’ worth of feminists.
Not a half bad period horror piece. Not as almost inaccessible as Lovecraft. More akin to Poe. Or Algernon Blackwood (whose collection I abandoned and will likely not pick up again). So if you’re into that sort of thing, I guess this is a book for you. Or source material for a college paper on women’s mental health in literature or something.
I guess you can expect to see me find other books that “fall into” this evening reading gap as I’m only at 54 books for the year, and it’s almost September.
