The yellow wall-paper

In the decades since the long-lost text of "The Yellow Wall-Paper" was rediscovered and reprinted by The Feminist Press, Charlotte Perkins Gilman's classic narrative of confinement and madness has become essential to the canon of North American literature.

First published in 1892, "The Yellow Wall-Paper" is written as the secret journal of a woman who, failing to relish the joys of marriage and motherhood, is sentenced to a country rest cure to remedy her "nervous condition" - which is actually postpartum depression. Though she longs to write, her husband and doctor forbid it, prescribing instead complete passivity.

Locked in her bedroom, the heroine creates a reality of her own beyond the hypnotic pattern of the faded yellow wallpaper - a pattern that has come to symbolize her own imprisonment. Narrated with superb psychological and dramatic precision, "The Yellow Wall-Paper" stands out not only for the imaginative authenticity with which it depicts one woman's descent into insanity, but also for the power of its testimony to the importance of freedom and self-empowerment for women.