The Yellow Wallpaper
Charlotte Perkins Gilman
Public domain text from Project Gutenberg.
The Yellow Wallpaper
By Charlotte Perkins Gilman
It is very seldom that mere ordinary people like John and myself secure
ancestral halls for the summer.
A colonial mansion, a hereditary estate, I would say a haunted house,
and reach the height of romantic felicity but that would be asking too
much of fate!
Still I will proudly declare that there is something queer about it.
Else, why should it be let so cheaply? And why have stood so long
untenanted?
John laughs at me, of course, but one expects that in marriage.
John is practical in the extreme. He has no patience with faith, an
intense horror of superstition, and he scoffs openly at any talk of
things not to be felt and seen and put down in figures.
John is a physician, and perhaps (I would not say it to a living soul,
of course, but this is dead paper and a great relief to my
mind) perhaps that is one reason I do not get well faster.
You see, he does not believe I am sick!
And what can one do?
If a physician of high standing, and one s own husband, assures friends
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and relatives that there is really nothing the matter with one but
temporary nervous depression a slight hysterical tendency what is one
to do?
My brother is also a physician, and also of high standing, and he says
the same thing.
So I take phosphates or phosphites whichever it is, and tonics, and
journeys, and air, and exercise, and am absolutely forbidden to work
until I am well again.
Personally, I disagree with their ideas.
Personally, I believe that congenial work, with excitement and change,
would do me good.
But what is one to do?
I did write for a while in spite of them; but it does exhaust me a good
deal having to be so sly about it, or else meet with heav…
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