The Yellow Wallpaper Trivia
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98 free The Yellow Wallpaper trivia questions with answers — literature quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
Charlotte Perkins Gilman wrote The Yellow Wallpaper in two days in 1890, after a doctor had ordered her to live as domestic a life as possible and never touch pen, brush or pencil again. The story she produced — a woman's secret journal from a barred upstairs room, where the paper on the walls begins to move — was turned down by one famous editor as too miserable to print, then largely forgotten for most of a century. These fifty questions follow the text closely: John's diagnosis and prescriptions, the house and the room, the pattern by day and by night, the sister-in-law and the visitors, and the creeping figure behind the paper. They then widen out to the real rest cure and the neurologist who devised it, Gilman's marriages, daughter, self-published periodical and other books, the story's rejection and revival, and its radio, stage, opera and film adaptations. It suits anyone who has read the story for a class or a book group, students revising the American short story, and trivia players who like a round built on a single text. Every answer carries an explanation and a source, so the page works as a study guide as well as a quiz.
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Q 01What does John do on entering the room to find Gilman's narrator creeping round the walls?
He faints
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.
Q 02Which name joins John's in the narrator's last cry in The Yellow Wallpaper, 'in spite of you and…'?
Jane
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.
Q 03Which light, 'worst of all', turns the outside pattern of the paper into bars for Gilman's narrator?
Moonlight
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'.
Q 04What about the paper, besides its look, does Gilman's narrator analyse for hours, then call 'yellow'?
Its smell
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.
Q 05What does John, 'a physician of high standing', assure relatives is all that ails Gilman's narrator?
Temporary nervous depression
Temporary nervous depression, 'a slight hysterical tendency', is the verdict; his prescription is tonics, journeys, air and exercise, and an absolute ban on 'work'.
Q 06What does Gilman's John say he doesn't care to do 'just for a three months' rental'?
Renovate the house
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'.
Q 07What does Gilman's narrator believe about the heavy bedstead in her upstairs room?
It is nailed down
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.
Q 08Which novelist was an aunt of Gilman's absent father, Frederic Perkins?
Harriet Beecher Stowe
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.
Q 09Which novelist, herself prescribed the rest cure, mocked it in a 1925 novel as 'rest in bed; rest in solitude'?
Virginia Woolf
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.
Q 10What did Gilman say her tale was meant to do, adding 'and it worked'?
Save people from being driven crazy
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.
Q 11What is the name of John's sister, the housekeeper who complains the paper stains everyone's clothes?
Jennie
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.
Q 12What kind of house have Gilman's narrator and John taken for the summer, one she longs to call haunted?
A colonial mansion
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.
Q 13Which holiday is 'over' when Gilman's narrator says mother and Nellie and the children stayed a week?
Q 21What has Gilman's narrator done to the wallpaper by the time John gets into the room at the end?
Pulled most of it off
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.
Q 22Which horror author's 1927 essay on supernatural fiction said The Yellow Wallpaper 'rises to a classic level'?
H. P. Lovecraft
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'.
Q 23Where does Gilman's narrator say she threw the key after locking herself in, 'under a plantain leaf'?
The Fourth of July
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.
Q 14Who, 'also a physician, and also of high standing', says the same as John about Gilman's narrator?
Her brother
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'.
Q 15What does Gilman's narrator see in the pattern as 'an interminable string… budding and sprouting'?
Toadstools
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'.
Q 16John's 'hysterical' verdict on Gilman's narrator takes its name from the Greek word for which organ?
The uterus
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.
Q 17What does Gilman's narrator judge her big, airy upstairs room was used as first?
A nursery
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'.
Q 18Which Gilman utopia ran as a serial in 1915 but did not appear as a book until 1979?
Herland
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'.
Q 19Which 1898 Gilman treatise, put into seven languages, argued motherhood should not preclude paid work?
Women and Economics
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.
Q 20In which Californian city did Gilman write The Yellow Wallpaper in 1890 and, decades later, die in 1935?
Pasadena
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.
Onto the front path
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.
Q 24What did Gilman's narrator want in the downstairs room John refused, the one opening on the piazza?
Roses all over the window
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.
Q 25Which periodical first printed The Yellow Wallpaper in 1892, after another had turned the tale down?
The New England Magazine
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.
Q 26Which periodical's editor Horace Scudder turned the tale down in 1890 for making him 'miserable'?
The Atlantic Monthly
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.
Q 27Which novelist passed Gilman's manuscript to editor Horace Scudder, who rejected it in 1890?
William Dean Howells
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.
Q 28What did Gilman write and edit single-handedly from 1909 to 1916, reaching nearly 1,500 subscribers?
The Forerunner
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.
Q 29Whose 1973 reissue, with an afterword by Elaine Hedges, made the tale a staple of women's studies courses?
The Feminist Press
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.
Q 30Which term was coined by Silas Weir Mitchell, the neurologist John threatens to send Gilman's narrator to?
Phantom limb
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.