50 Fun Facts About The Yellow Wallpaper

What does John do on entering the room to find Gilman's narrator creeping round the stripped 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 'with a slight hysterical tendency' is the verdict; his prescription is tonics, journeys, air and exercise, and an absolute ban on 'work'.

How long is the summer lease for which John will not 'renovate the house' in The Yellow Wallpaper?

Three months is the lease, John says, so the paper stays — and after it, he warns, she would want the heavy bedstead changed, then the windows, 'and so on'.

What does Gilman's narrator believe about the 'great immovable bed' in her upstairs room?

It is nailed down, she believes — and by the end that bedstead, with its canvas mattress, is all that remains in the stripped room once the furniture is carried out.

Which novelist was an aunt of Gilman's absent father Frederic Perkins, and a support to the family?

Harriet Beecher Stowe, author of Uncle Tom's Cabin, and her suffragist sister Isabella Hooker both shaped young Charlotte's view of the world after Frederic left.

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

Virginia Woolf had the same treatment Gilman endured, and her 1925 novel has a society doctor 'invoke proportion' before ordering silence and rest.

What did Gilman say The Yellow Wallpaper was intended to do, adding 'and it worked'?

Save people from being driven crazy, she said; she had defied her own doctor's orders and gone back to work, then wrote the tale 'with additions and exaggerations' to indict the medical field.

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

Jennie, 'a perfect, and enthusiastic housekeeper', finds yellow marks on everyone's clothes and is once caught with her hand on the paper — the narrator takes her for a rival.

How does Gilman's narrator describe the summer house — haunted would be 'asking too much of fate'?

A colonial mansion, 'a hereditary estate', she writes, standing quite alone well back from the road, with greenhouses 'all broken now' and hedges, walls and gates that lock.

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, the outer pattern being 'a florid arabesque, reminding one of a fungus' that sprouts new shoots and new shades of yellow.

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 was Gilman's only child named, born in March 1885, just before the breakdown behind the tale?

Katharine, born on March 23, 1885, lived until 1979; after the separation Gilman sent her east to her father, who she said 'had a right to some of' the girl's society.

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 made Gilman internationally famous; it borrowed from Thorstein Veblen the idea that women are objects of exchange between men, and admirers ranked it with John Stuart Mill's The Subjection of Women.

In which Californian city did Gilman write the tale on June 6 and 7, 1890, and later die in 1935?

Pasadena is where Gilman fled 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.

Whose 1989 version, written by Maggie Wadey and directed by John Clive, starred Julia Watson?

The BBC film, with Stephen Dillane as the husband, was later shown in the United States on Masterpiece Theatre, decades before a 2011 American version went straight to video.

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.

Where was The Yellow Wallpaper first printed, in January 1892, a year and a half after Gilman wrote it?

The New England Magazine ran it as 'The Yellow Wall-paper'; the tale had been written in two days in June 1890 and rejected by a rival editor that same summer.

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

The Atlantic Monthly had a new editor: Scudder was only a couple of months into the job when the manuscript arrived on August 28, 1890, and he turned it down quickly.

Which novelist passed Gilman's manuscript to editor Horace Scudder on August 28, 1890?

William Dean Howells, 'the Dean of American Letters', had once edited the same periodical himself, which is why the tale reached Scudder's desk on August 28, 1890.

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, and has been called 'perhaps the greatest literary accomplishment of her long career'.

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

The Feminist Press, founded in 1970 to rescue 'lost' works by women, put the tale on women's studies syllabuses nationwide; the Norton Anthology of American Literature admitted it in 1990.

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

Phantom limb was Mitchell's coinage from Civil War nerve-injury wards; the man behind the rest cure is also remembered as the father of medical neurology.

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

Philadelphia was Mitchell's lifelong base: born there in 1829, he took his MD at its Jefferson Medical College, served as president of its College of Physicians and died there in 1914.

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

Milk by the quart — two or more a day — went with bed rest, isolation, a fat-rich diet, massage and sometimes electrotherapy, a regime popularly known as 'Dr Diet and Dr Quiet'.

Where did the 18-year-old Gilman enrol to study art in 1878, paid for by her absent father?

Rhode Island School of Design classes led to a living painting trade cards, and to a bond with Martha Luther, met there in about 1879, that biographers read as romantic.

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

Charles Walter Stetson then married Gilman's close friend, and Gilman wrote that their daughter's 'second mother was fully as good as the first, [and perhaps] better in some ways'.

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 call the long, even streak rubbed round the wall at shoulder height?

Smooch is her word for the mark that runs behind every piece of furniture except the bed — and by the end her own shoulder 'just fits' in it as she creeps round the room.

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 the endearment that follows his refusal to change the paper, on the grounds that giving way to 'fancies' would only make her nervous nature worse.

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.

Which pioneering woman physician gave Gilman a second opinion, prescribing activity rather than rest?

Mary Putnam Jacobi, among the first female doctors and a strong opponent of the rest theory, ordered a regimen of physical and mental work that proved far more successful.

Which literary historian found Mitchell still planning rest-cure hospitals in 1908, refuting Gilman?

Julie Bates Dock found Mitchell unchanged sixteen years after publication, still hoping to build entire hospitals devoted to the cure so his treatments could reach more patients.

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.

Which close friend of Gilman's became her ex-husband's second wife and helped raise Gilman's daughter?

Grace Ellery Channing was the friend Gilman went to live with in California after the 1888 separation; Gilman later said she was glad for the couple and that the girl 'had a right to know and love her father'.

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

Nationalism's clubs aimed to 'end capitalism's greed and distinctions between classes'; Gilman's satirical poem 'Similar Cases' ran in the movement's own periodical and won her critics' praise.

In Gilman's The Crux, women from the Northeast go west to open a boardinghouse for men in which state?

Colorado is the setting; like much of her fiction, the novel reached readers as a serial in the periodical she wrote alone rather than from a book publisher.

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.

Dani Howard's 2023 opera, with a libretto by Joseph Spence, premiered at which city's opera festival?

Copenhagen Opera Festival staged the British composer's version in August 2023, one of a line of musical and stage takes that began with Toronto's Nightwood Theatre in 1981.

Which sociology student narrates Gilman's 1915 utopian novel as one of a three-man expedition party?

Van Jennings — Vandyck in full — travels with two friends who each expect a different kind of woman; the inhabitants outrun them, then overpower and anaesthetise the trio.

The 2011 direct-to-video film starring Aric Cushing was shot at a Civil War-era house in which state?

Georgia's Eatonton supplied the isolated house; director Logan Thomas called the loose adaptation 'more of a gothic mind bender' than a horror movie, and its lead Juliet Landau plays a writer named Charlotte.