98 Fun Facts About The Yellow Wallpaper

What does John do on entering the room to find Gilman's narrator creeping round the walls?

He faints right across her path by the wall, so she has to creep over him each time she circles the room; 'Now why should that man have fainted?' she wonders.

Which name joins John's in the narrator's last cry in The Yellow Wallpaper, 'in spite of you and…'?

Jane appears nowhere else in the text, which leaves readers to decide whether the narrator is naming herself, the dutiful wife she has escaped along with John.

Which light, 'worst of all', turns the outside pattern of the paper into bars for Gilman's narrator?

Moonlight, which 'shines in all night when there is a moon', makes the paper seem a different thing entirely; by daylight the woman behind it is 'subdued, quiet'.

What about the paper, besides its look, does Gilman's narrator analyse for hours, then call 'yellow'?

Its smell — 'a yellow smell' — hangs about the house whether the windows are open or not, and she thinks 'seriously of burning the house' to reach it.

What does John, 'a physician of high standing', assure relatives is all that ails Gilman's narrator?

Temporary nervous depression, 'a slight hysterical tendency', is the verdict; his prescription is tonics, journeys, air and exercise, and an absolute ban on 'work'.

What does Gilman's John say he doesn't care to do 'just for a three months' rental'?

Renovate the house is what he won't do for so short a let; when she asks to move downstairs instead, he says he would go down to the cellar if she wished, 'and have it whitewashed into the bargain'.

What does Gilman's narrator believe about the heavy bedstead in her upstairs room?

It is nailed down, she believes; on the last day she tries to lift and push it until she is lame, then bites a piece off one corner in her anger and hurts her teeth.

Which novelist was an aunt of Gilman's absent father, Frederic Perkins?

Harriet Beecher Stowe, author of Uncle Tom's Cabin, was Charlotte's great-aunt; once Frederic left, her debt-ridden mother moved the children nineteen times in eighteen years, at times into relatives' homes.

Which novelist, herself prescribed the rest cure, mocked it in a 1925 novel as 'rest in bed; rest in solitude'?

Virginia Woolf put the cure in the mouth of Sir William Bradshaw in Mrs Dalloway; faced with being sent away to one of his homes, the shell-shocked veteran Septimus Smith leaps to his death.

What did Gilman say her tale was meant to do, adding 'and it worked'?

Save people from being driven crazy, she wrote in 1913; she had cast her doctor's advice aside and gone back to work, then sent him a copy of the tale and never had a reply.

What is the name of John's sister, the housekeeper who complains the paper stains everyone's clothes?

Jennie, an 'enthusiastic housekeeper' who 'hopes for no better profession', finds yellow marks on the clothes and is once caught with her hand on the paper; the narrator is sure she is studying the pattern too.

What kind of house have Gilman's narrator and John taken for the summer, one she longs to call haunted?

A colonial mansion, 'a hereditary estate', let so cheaply and left so long untenanted that she is sure something is queer about it; legal trouble among the heirs had kept it empty for years.

Which holiday is 'over' when Gilman's narrator says mother and Nellie and the children stayed a week?

The Fourth of July visit was John's idea of 'a little company' to do her good; it leaves her exhausted, and his sister takes over the housekeeping from then on.

Who, 'also a physician, and also of high standing', says the same as John about Gilman's narrator?

Her brother is a physician too, so the two men who rule on her health are both family; a friend who was once in Mitchell's hands says he 'is just like John and my brother, only more so'.

What does Gilman's narrator see in the pattern as 'an interminable string… budding and sprouting'?

Toadstools 'in joints' is her image for a pattern she likens to a bad dream: follow it, she says, and it 'slaps you in the face, knocks you down, and tramples upon you'.

John's 'hysterical' verdict on Gilman's narrator takes its name from the Greek word for which organ?

The uterus is 'hystera' in Greek, and the ancient idea of a 'wandering womb' causing disease survived in the diagnosis doctors handed to women for centuries.

What does Gilman's narrator judge her big, airy upstairs room was used as first?

A nursery first, 'then playground and gymnasium', she judges, because the windows are barred 'for little children' and there are 'rings and things in the walls'.

Which Gilman utopia ran as a serial in 1915 but did not appear as a book until 1979?

Herland's women bear children by parthenogenesis and have no surnames at all — 'Why should we?' one asks; 'we are all descended from a common source'.

Which 1898 Gilman treatise, put into seven languages, argued motherhood should not preclude paid work?

Women and Economics was a radical call for women's economic independence, and it proposed handing housework and child care to trained professionals so that wives could earn.

In which Californian city did Gilman write The Yellow Wallpaper in 1890 and, decades later, die in 1935?

Pasadena is where Gilman moved with her daughter in 1888 after separating from her husband, and where she returned in 1934 to be near that daughter for her final year.

What has Gilman's narrator done to the wallpaper by the time John gets into the room at the end?

Pulled most of it off, with help: 'I pulled and she shook, I shook and she pulled, and before morning we had peeled off yards of that paper,' she says of the woman in the pattern.

Which horror author's 1927 essay on supernatural fiction said The Yellow Wallpaper 'rises to a classic level'?

H. P. Lovecraft praised how subtly it traces 'the madness which crawls over a woman dwelling in the hideously papered room where a madwoman was once confined'.

Where does Gilman's narrator say she threw the key after locking herself in, 'under a plantain leaf'?

Onto the front path it goes, and she tells John so 'in the gentlest voice', then again 'several times, very gently and slowly', until he goes down to fetch it.

What did Gilman's narrator want in the downstairs room John refused, the one opening on the piazza?

Roses all over the window and 'pretty old-fashioned chintz hangings' were her wish, but John said there was only one window, no room for two beds and no near room for him.

Which periodical first printed The Yellow Wallpaper in 1892, after another had turned the tale down?

The New England Magazine ran it as 'The Yellow Wall-paper', more than a year after a rival editor had sent the manuscript back saying it had made him miserable.

Which periodical's editor Horace Scudder turned the tale down in 1890 for making him 'miserable'?

The Atlantic Monthly had a new editor: Scudder, only months into the job, sent the manuscript back with a note saying he could not forgive himself if he made others as miserable as he had made himself.

Which novelist passed Gilman's manuscript to editor Horace Scudder, who rejected it in 1890?

William Dean Howells, 'the Dean of American Letters', had edited the same periodical himself for a decade; even his backing could not get the tale past Scudder.

What did Gilman write and edit single-handedly from 1909 to 1916, reaching nearly 1,500 subscribers?

The Forerunner carried much of her fiction as serials, including What Diantha Did and The Crux; over seven years she filled 86 issues, then closed it and turned to newspaper work.

Whose 1973 reissue, with an afterword by Elaine Hedges, made the tale a staple of women's studies courses?

The Feminist Press was founded in 1970 to rescue 'lost' works by women, and it was Elaine Hedges who suggested this one for its series of rediscovered classics.

Which term was coined by Silas Weir Mitchell, the neurologist John threatens to send Gilman's narrator to?

Phantom limb was Mitchell's name for what he saw in Civil War amputees, nearly all of whom, he reported, still felt the missing arm or leg.

Silas Weir Mitchell, the neurologist named in the tale, led which city's College of Physicians?

Philadelphia was Mitchell's home from his birth in 1829 to his death in 1914, and Gilman was among the patients who took his rest cure, in 1887, the experience behind the tale.

Which food did Mitchell's rest cure prescribe in large quantities to 'fatten and redden' his patients?

Milk came by the quart, two or more a day, while the patient lay in bed for weeks, at first forbidden even to sit up, sew or read, and was fed by a nurse.

Which artist did Gilman marry in 1884, in a union ended by separation in 1888 and divorce in 1894?

Charles Walter Stetson recorded his wife's collapse in his diaries; when they parted in 1888, a rare step at the time, she took their daughter west to California.

Houghton Gilman, the Wall Street attorney whom Gilman married in 1900, was also her what?

Her first cousin had not seen her in roughly fifteen years when she got in touch; they lived in New York until 1922, then moved to his old family homestead in Norwich, Connecticut.

What does Gilman's narrator see recurring where the pattern 'lolls like a broken neck'?

Two bulbous eyes recur in the pattern, and she grows 'positively angry with the impertinence of it'; she admits she has always found faces in blank walls and furniture since childhood.

What does Gilman's narrator tie herself with on the last day, something John's sister 'did not find'?

A rope, 'well-hidden', keeps her from being got 'out in the road there'; she considers jumping from the window as 'admirable exercise' but finds the bars too strong even to try.

What does John call Gilman's narrator while promising to whitewash the cellar if she wishes?

A blessed little goose is what he calls her, taking her in his arms, when she begs to move downstairs instead; nothing is worse for a nervous patient, he has told her, than giving way to such fancies.

What did Gilman's 1898 treatise propose for homes, with cooperative versions in city apartment blocks?

Kitchenless houses would free wives to work and give homebound women company; the idea, like much of her technical optimism, owed a debt to Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward.

What does Gilman's narrator believe John's sister blames for her illness?

Her writing is what the sister thinks made her sick, the narrator is sure, so she waits until the house is empty and puts the pages away whenever she hears someone on the stairs.

When Gilman's narrator tells John she feels something strange about the house, what does he say it was?

A draught, says John, 'practical in the extreme', a man with 'an intense horror of superstition' who scoffs at anything that cannot be felt, seen and put down in figures.

Sari Edelstein reads the patterns 'committing every artistic sin' as an allegory of Gilman's hatred for what?

Yellow journalism — the sensational press that often scandalised Gilman herself — is the target in this reading, which sees the narrator's struggle with the pattern as Gilman's with tabloids.

Whom did Gilman's ex-husband marry in 1894, a match Gilman said she was glad of?

Her close friend Grace Ellery Channing, with whom she had lived in California after the separation, became his second wife; Gilman then sent their daughter east to live with the couple.

Gilman's lecturing career began with which movement, founded on Edward Bellamy's novel Looking Backward?

Nationalism here meant nationalising industry rather than patriotism: Bellamy's readers founded clubs to bring about his novel's cooperative state, and Gilman's poem 'Similar Cases' ran in their magazine.

Early in The Yellow Wallpaper, what does the narrator say 'one expects… in marriage'?

Being laughed at: 'John laughs at me, of course, but one expects that in marriage,' she writes, having just wondered aloud why so fine a house was let so cheaply.

When a carriage comes along 'that long road', where does the creeping woman Gilman's narrator watches hide?

Under the blackberry vines she goes, for 'it must be very humiliating to be caught creeping by daylight' — which is why the narrator always locks her own door first.

What does John cry for when he finds the door locked at the end of The Yellow Wallpaper?

An axe, he shouts, pounding on the door; 'It would be a shame to break down that beautiful door!' she thinks, and calmly tells him where to find the key instead.

Which colour, 'instead of yellow', does Gilman's narrator give as her reason for staying in the room?

Green is everything out of doors, she says, where 'you have to creep on the ground'; in the room she can creep smoothly on the floor, keeping to the wall so that she 'cannot lose my way'.

In The Yellow Wallpaper, what does John mention standing 'at the head of the stairs' of the rented house?

A gate: give way on the paper, John argues, and next it would be the heavy bedstead, then the barred windows, then 'that gate at the head of the stairs', so nothing is changed at all.

Which room at the top of the rented house does John choose for his wife in The Yellow Wallpaper?

The nursery gets air and sunshine from every side, so John picks it for her health, overruling her wish for a pretty room downstairs. She spends the summer in a room meant for children.

While women got bed rest, where did Weir Mitchell, the doctor named in The Yellow Wallpaper, send anxious men?

Out West was his cure for men: long spells of cattle roping, hunting and rough riding, while worried women were put to bed for weeks.

Which three things did Weir Mitchell tell Charlotte Perkins Gilman never to touch again as long as she lived?

Pen, brush or pencil were banned for life, along with all but two hours of intellectual life a day. She obeyed for a season and came close to collapse.

What does John cry out for when he cannot get into the upstairs room at the end of The Yellow Wallpaper?

An axe is what John shouts for, and his wife thinks it would be a shame to break down such a beautiful door. She calmly tells him where to find the key instead.

Which storytelling device lets The Yellow Wallpaper hint at a darker past for the room while its teller blames children?

An unreliable narrator lists the scratched floor and dug-out plaster and puts it all down to children. Readers are left to suspect what she cannot see.

What does Gilman's narrator do to one corner of the bedstead in a rage while John is away on the last day?

Bites a piece off is the literal truth: she gnaws the wood after failing to move the frame, and admits it hurt her teeth. Moments earlier she had blamed the tooth marks on children.

Weir Mitchell, the specialist John threatens his wife with in The Yellow Wallpaper, had which second career?

Writing novels and poetry made up his other life: after an 1866 short story he split his time between science and fiction. The doctor who told Gilman to stop kept on himself.

Which 1963 novel of a young woman's breakdown is The Yellow Wallpaper often compared with?

The Bell Jar, by Sylvia Plath, is the usual pairing: both follow a gifted woman's collapse under the expectations placed on her sex. Gilman's tale came seven decades earlier.

The Yellow Wallpaper is told through which kind of document, written by a wife whose husband hates her to write?

A secret journal carries the whole tale: she calls it dead paper and a great relief to her mind, and breaks off whenever someone climbs the stairs.

Told her breast cancer was incurable, the author of The Yellow Wallpaper ended her life with an overdose of what?

Chloroform was her chosen exit: an advocate of euthanasia for the terminally ill, she wrote that she preferred it to cancer. She died quickly and quietly.

Who looks after the narrator's baby in The Yellow Wallpaper, sparing a mother too anxious to be with him?

Mary is so good with the baby, the narrator says, yet she cannot bear to be near him herself. Her one comfort is that he does not have to sleep in the papered room.

Which American master of the macabre does critic Susan Lanser set beside The Yellow Wallpaper?

Edgar Allan Poe is her comparison: the misery an editor gave as his reason for rejecting Gilman's tale, she argues, could be said just as well of his stories.

For its themes of madness and powerlessness, The Yellow Wallpaper is sometimes cited as an example of which genre?

Gothic literature is the label, and editor Alan Ryan called the tale one of the finest horror stories ever written, adding that it may be a ghost story or, worse yet, may not.

What stands at the head of the stairs in the summer house of The Yellow Wallpaper, which John will not remove?

A gate closes off the stairhead, and John names it with the heavy bedstead when he refuses to alter a house rented for one summer. Change one thing, he says, and she will want the rest gone.

Which habit does John start in The Yellow Wallpaper by ordering his wife to do it for an hour after each meal?

Lying down after meals was also among the orders Weir Mitchell gave Gilman herself. Her narrator calls it a bad habit, since she never sleeps and it only teaches her to deceive.

John, 'practical in the extreme', is said in The Yellow Wallpaper to have an intense horror of what?

Superstition horrifies him, and he scoffs at anything that cannot be felt, seen and put down in figures. So when his wife feels something queer about the house, he laughs.

On the last day, Gilman's narrator will not creep outside, where everything is which colour 'instead of yellow'?

Green is the colour of the garden she once called delicious; by the end she prefers the papered room, where she can creep smoothly on the floor.

In a 1913 essay on The Yellow Wallpaper, Gilman said she threw Mitchell's advice to the winds and went back to what?

Work, she wrote, is the normal life of every human being, bringing joy and growth and service. Returning to it, with a friend's help, pulled her back from the edge of ruin.

For Gilman's narrator, what rules out the leap she calls 'admirable exercise' on her last day in the room?

Bars on the windows are too strong even to try, she writes, before adding that such a step would be improper and might be misconstrued. She had taken them for a precaution for little children.

Why has the summer estate in The Yellow Wallpaper stood empty for years, the narrator believes?

Legal trouble over heirs and co-heirs is the dull truth, as far as she knows it. She admits it spoils her ghostliness, then insists she can still feel something strange about the house.

When Gilman's narrator feels something strange about the house, what does John say it is before shutting the window?

A draught is all John will allow, the practical man's answer to a wife who half hopes the place is haunted. She admits she gets unreasonably angry with him.

Gilman's narrator says the paint and paper of the upstairs room look as if which institution had used it?

A boys' school is her guess at the vandals: the paper is stripped in great patches around the bed, about as far as she can reach. By the end she is the one tearing it off the walls.

What does John call his wife in The Yellow Wallpaper when he wakes to find her out of bed at night?

Little girl is his name for her as he warns she will catch cold walking about. She had got up to feel whether the paper really moved.

How does Gilman's narrator address John, as if he were a stranger, when he pounds and calls at the door?

Young man is how she speaks to her own husband by then, telling him he cannot open it. She now believes she is the woman who came out of the paper.

What reason does Gilman's narrator merrily give John's sister for stripping yards of paper overnight?

Pure spite at the vicious thing is her cheerful excuse, and the sister-in-law laughs that she would not mind doing it herself. The narrator takes that as proof she wants the paper too.

Gilman's narrator likens the slanting waves of the pattern to a lot of which wallowing plants 'in full chase'?

Seaweeds in full chase is one of a string of her images for the design, which she also says slaps you in the face, knocks you down and tramples upon you.

Which Connecticut city was the 1860 birthplace of Charlotte Perkins Gilman, author of The Yellow Wallpaper?

Hartford was her birthplace, but her father left soon after and the family had to move every year on the little money he provided.

During which kind of weather did Gilman write The Yellow Wallpaper in two days in the summer of 1890?

A heat wave was baking southern California when she finished the tale in two days, having already separated from her husband. It then waited more than a year to be printed.

In The Yellow Wallpaper, John would as soon put what in his wife's pillow-case as let her have stimulating company?

Fireworks in her pillow-case is John's joke about the lively relatives she longs to see. He promises to invite them for a long stay once she is really well.

Why does John say they cannot leave the summer house early in The Yellow Wallpaper?

Their home is under repair, John says, and he cannot leave town just now. He adds that she is plainly improving, whatever she feels: he is a doctor, and he knows.

In The Yellow Wallpaper, what does John do after carrying his crying wife upstairs and laying her on the bed?

Reads to her until it tires her head, then tells her only she can help herself, by will and self-control. She had been asking in tears to visit her relatives.

In The Yellow Wallpaper, what does the pattern do to the women who try to climb through it, the narrator decides?

Strangles them off and turns them upside down: that is her explanation for the many heads in the design. If the heads were covered, she says, it would not be half so bad.

What does the narrator of The Yellow Wallpaper finally decide makes the front pattern move at night?

A woman shaking it from behind is her great discovery, made by watching at night when the design changes. Sometimes she thinks there are many women, sometimes only one crawling fast.

Arguing that the brain is not an organ of sex, Gilman said one might as well speak of a female what?

Liver was her punchline: she held that there is no female mind, and that the roles handed to men and women were artificial rather than natural.

Which future giant of psychology reviewed Weir Mitchell's rest-cure book in 1887, the year Mitchell treated Gilman?

Sigmund Freud reviewed it and borrowed from it: Mitchell's use of physical relaxation in therapy arguably gave psychoanalysis its couch.

Which diagnosis did Weir Mitchell call rife among women who tried to exceed their natural limits?

Neurasthenia, or exhaustion of the nerves, was the label, and he blamed it on women attempting too much study or public life. His answer was complete rest and isolation.

As a child, Gilman's narrator felt safe from fierce-looking furniture by hopping into which 'strong friend'?

A chair was her refuge, and the knobs of the family bureau had a kindly wink. John treats that same imagination as a danger and tells her to check it by will and good sense.

Gilman's narrator calls the bloated curves of the paper a 'debased' form of which style, with delirium tremens?

Romanesque gone wrong is her verdict on curves that waddle up and down in isolated columns. She adds that she knows a little of the principles of design, and this obeys none of them.

Gilman's narrator watches the woman creep across open country as fast as what 'in a high wind'?

A cloud shadow is her measure of the speed, watched from a room that looks out on every side. She wonders whether the creeper could be seen from all of them at once, but cannot turn fast enough to tell.

Which flowers does Gilman's narrator name as beautiful yellow things, unlike the 'old foul, bad' ones the paper recalls?

Buttercups are the one pleasant yellow she can think of; everything else the paper brings to mind is old, foul and bad. She says she has tried to count its shades and cannot.

Which colour does Gilman's narrator see in some places of the faded paper, calling it 'dull yet lurid'?

Orange in some places and a sickly sulphur tint in others: the paper is never one clean yellow. She calls the colour repellent, almost revolting, and says slow-turning sunlight has faded it.

On which radio programme did Agnes Moorehead perform The Yellow Wallpaper twice, in 1948 and again in 1957?

Suspense, on CBS radio, cast Moorehead in 1948 and brought her back for a second production nine years later.

Which heading ran over the 1892 Boston letter asking whether tales like The Yellow Wallpaper should be printed at all?

Perilous Stuff was signed only M. D., and Gilman guessed the writer was a physician stung by her picture of his profession. She argued the tale did good, not harm.

Which of these is the 1877 medical text by Weir Mitchell, the rest-cure doctor named in The Yellow Wallpaper?

Fat and Blood matches the diet he favoured: he believed plenty of fat would fatten and redden a patient kept in bed.

What did the young Charlotte Perkins Gilman illustrate to support herself after her art classes?

Trade cards paid her way as a jobbing artist, and she also tutored and painted. The famous specialist who treated her in 1887 wanted all of that given up.

Which actress and singer recorded a reading of The Yellow Wallpaper for Audible Studios in 2022?

Cynthia Erivo followed a line of performers stretching back to Agnes Moorehead, who first played the part on radio in 1948.

Which salts does Gilman's narrator take without being sure of their name, along with tonics, journeys and air?

Phosphates or phosphites, whichever it is, she writes, shrugging at a remedy chosen for her. Her own belief, that excitement and change would do her good, counts for nothing.

Gilman's autobiography, published after her death in 1935, is titled 'The' what 'of Charlotte Perkins Gilman'?

Living is the title's odd, active noun; she began the book in 1925 and it appeared only after she was gone.

Which ornamental style does Gilman's narrator call the 'florid' outside pattern that turns 'a back somersault' on her?

Arabesque is her word for the surface design, and following it, she says, is like a bad dream: you think you have mastered it, and it throws you.

How are John and Gilman's narrator due to travel home the day after her last day in the papered room?

By boat is the plan for the next day, after one last night spent downstairs. From her room she has a view of the bay and a small private wharf belonging to the estate.