Project Gutenberg's The Yellow Wallpaper, by Charlotte Perkins Gilman

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Title: The Yellow Wallpaper

Author: Charlotte Perkins Gilman

Posting Date: November 25, 2008 [EBook #1952]
Release Date: November, 1999

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

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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
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 heavy opposition.

I sometimes fancy that my condition if I had