The Yellow Wallpaper/The Giant Wistaria by Charlotte Perkins Gilman

First appearing in 1892 The Yellow Wallpaper is a searing vision of a distinctively feminine form of madness and commands attention as an arresting tale of horror and a moving look into a woman's mind.

The story uncompromisingly thrusts the reader into the mind of the narrator. She is a woman forced, ostensibly for her own good, into a 'rest cure', a psychological straitjacket so constricting that she begins to unravel. Her mental dissolution is described with such fierce immediacy that The Yellow Wallpaper has been read and anthologized as a chilling horror tale. While it can easily be appreciated for its disorienting thrills, the story's true resonance comes from its matter-of-fact portrayal of a woman pushed to the rim of sanity by society's demands and her family's utter inability to conceive of the fact that she cannot fit within their strictures.

“The Giant Wistaria” was largely forgotten until 1988, when Gloria A. Biamonte reprinted it with an introduction in an issue of Legacy: A Journal of Nineteenth-Century Women Writers. Since then, it has received so much attention that it may well be regarded as Gilman’s second-most famous short story.

The prelude sets the story not among the wisterias of Pasadena but in the settlements of colonial New England; the “giant wistaria” has been brought from Europe by an immigrant family whose daughter has become an unwed mother. The remainder of the story takes place in the same house more than a century later.

***Note: the works of Charlotte Perkins Gilman are in the public domain and are available for free online. These two stories have also been published together in several anthologies, such as the one available at this link: https://bookshop.org/p/books/the-yellow-wall-paper-herland-and-selected-writings-charlotte-perkins-gilman/ecd425bdc78009ed?ean=9780143105855&next=t***