Book: The Yellow Wall-Paper
Author: Charlotte Perkins Gilman
Rating: 🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟
Completed this for the Popsugar Reading Challenge Prompt #24 (a book about postpartum) and the 52 Book Club Reading Challenge Prompt #38 (domestic fiction)
A woman, diagnosed with a nervous temperament after she gives birth, is shut in a room with garish yellow wallpaper, and slowly loses her mind.
Two newspaper men follow an obsession into some very strange lodgings.
A few young couples rent a summer house that might be haunted.
A woman contemplates the drudgery of housework.
A love triangle takes an unexpected turn.
A poet grows besotted with a woman quite different than him.
A strange town is born – unlike any that has ever existed.
A woman is judged not for the greater good but for what she allegedly didn’t do for her child.
A woman in her early forties finds herself being pulled into a life that she’d rather not live.
And finally a woman does her best to counter the harm her son does.
These stories are all a little unhinged in the best possible way with the literary equivalent of a sucker punch in the last few sentences.
They are full of men trying to convince women they know best when they really don’t, as well as the consequences for such missteps.
Gilman is fiercely and unapologetically feminist in the morals of her story which is delightful.
It is definitely a book worth picking up – if not for the title story (which is sometimes sold as a standalone book) then definitely one of the others.
A great short read which makes you laugh and has very satisfying endings. ✨
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