 This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information and to find out how you can volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins-Gillman 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 reached 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 to matter with one but temporary nervous depression, a slight hysterical tendency, what's 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 less opposition and more society and stimulus, but John says the very worst thing I can do is to think about my condition, and I confess it always makes me feel bad. So I will let it alone and talk about the house. The most beautiful place. It is quite alone, standing well back from the road, quite three miles from the village. It makes me think of English places that you read about, for there are hedges and walls and gates that lock, and lots of separate little houses for the gardeners and people. There is a delicious garden. I never saw such a garden, large and shady, full of box-boarded paths, and lined with long, grape-covered arbors with seats under them. There were greenhouses, too, but they are all broken now. There was some legal trouble, I believe, something about the heirs and co-heirs. Anyhow, the place has been empty for years. That spoils my ghostliness, I'm afraid, but I don't care. There's something strange about the house. I can feel it. I even said so to John one moonlight evening, but he said what I felt was a draft and shut the window. I get unreasonably angry with John sometimes. I'm sure I never used to be so sensitive. I think it's due to this nervous condition. But John says if I feel so, I shall neglect proper self-control, so I take pains to control myself, before him, at least, and that makes me very tired. I don't like our room a bit. I wandered one downstairs that opened on the piazza and had roses all over the window in such pretty old-fashioned shins' hangings, but John would not hear of it. He said there was only one window, and not room for two beds, and no near room for him if he took another. He is very careful and loving, and hardly lets me stir without special direction. I have a schedule prescription for each hour in the day. He takes all care for me, and so I feel basely ungrateful not to value it more. He said when we came here solely on my account, that I was to have perfect rest and all the air I could get. Your exercise depends on your strength, my dear, said he, and your food somewhat on your appetite, but air you can absorb all the time. So we took the nursery at the top of the house. It is a big, airy room, the whole floor nearly, with windows that look always, and air and sunshine galore. It was nursery first, and then playroom and gymnasium, I should judge. There are bars for little children, and there are rings and things in the walls. The paint and paper look as if a boy's school had used it. It is stripped off the paper, in great patches all around the head of my bed, about as far as I can reach, and in a great place on the other side of the room, low down. I never saw worse paper in my life. One of those sprawling flamboyant patterns committing every artistic sin. It is dull enough to confuse the eye in following, pronounced enough to constantly irritate and provoke study, and when you follow the lame, uncertain curves for a little distance, they suddenly commit suicide, plunge off at outrageous angles, destroy themselves, and unheard of contradictions. The color is repellent, almost revolting, a smoldering, unclean yellow, strangely faded by the slow turning sunlight. It is a dull, yet lurid orange in some places, a silky, sulfur tint in others. No wonder the children hated it. I should hate it myself if I had to live in this room long. There comes John, and I must put this away. He hates to have me write a word. We have been here two weeks, and I haven't felt like writing before since that first day. I am sitting by the window now, up in this atrocious nursery, and there is nothing to hinder my writing as much as I please save lack of strength. John is away all day, and even some nights when his cases are serious. I'm glad my case is not serious, but those nervous troubles are dreadfully depressing. John does not know how much I really suffer. He knows there's no reason to suffer, and that satisfies him. Of course it is only nervousness. It does weigh on me so not to do my duty in any way. I meant to be such a help to John, such a real rest and comfort, and here I am, a comparative burden already. Nobody would believe what an effort it is to do it little I'm able to dress and entertain in other things. It is fortunate that Mary is so good with the baby, such a dear baby, and yet I cannot be with him. It makes me so nervous. I suppose John was never nervous in his life. He laughs at me so about this wallpaper. At first he meant to repaper the room, but afterwards he said I was letting it get the better of me, and that nothing was worse for a nervous patient than to give way to such fancies. He said that after the wallpaper was changed it would be the heavy bedstead, then the barred windows, and then that gate at the head of the stairs, and so on. You know the place is doing you good, he said, and really dear, I don't care to renovate the house just for a three-month rental. Then do let us go downstairs, I said. There are such pretty rooms there. Then he took me in his arms and called me a blessed little goose, and said he would go down to the cellar if I wished, and have it whitewashed into the bargain. But he is right enough about the beds and windows and things. It is an airy and comfortable room as anyone need wish, and of course I would not be so silly as to make him uncomfortable just for a whim. I'm really getting quite fond of the big room, although that horrid wallpaper. Out of one window I can see the garden, those mysterious deep-shaded arbors, the riotous old-fashioned flowers, and bushes and gnarly trees. Out of another I get a lovely view of the bay and a little private wharf belonging to the estate. There is a beautiful shaded lane that runs down there from the house. I always fancy I see people walking these numerous paths and arbors, but John has cautioned me not to give way to fancy in the least. He says that with my imaginative power and habit of story-making, a nervous weakness like mine is sure to lead to all manner of excited fancies, and that I ought to try to use my will and good sense to check the tendency. So I try. I think sometimes that if I were only well enough to write a little more, it would relieve the press of ideas and rest me. But I find I get pretty tired when I try. It is so discouraging not to have any advice and companionship about my work. When I get really well, John says we will ask cousin Henry and Julia down for a long visit. But he says he would as soon put fireworks in my pillowcase as to let me have those stimulating people about now. I wish I could get well faster. But I must not think about that. This paper looks to me as if it knew what a vicious influence it had. There is a recurrent spot where the pattern longs like a broken neck and two bulbous eyes stare at you upside down. I get positively angry with the impertinence of it and the everlastingness. Up and down and sideways they crawl and those absurd and blinking eyes are everywhere. There is one place where two breaths didn't match and the eyes go all up and down the line, one a little higher than the other. I never saw so much expression in an inanimate thing before, and we all know how much expression they have. I used to lie awake as a child and get more entertainment and terror out of blank walls and plain furniture than most children could find in a toy store. I remember what a kindly wink the knobs of our big old bureau used to have and there was one chair that always seemed like a strong friend. I used to feel that if any of the other things looked too fierce I could always hop into that chair and be safe. The furniture in this room is no worse than inharmonious however for we had to bring it all from downstairs. I suppose when this was used as a playroom they had to take the nursery things out and no wonder I never saw such ravages as the children have made here. The wallpaper, as I said before, is torn off in spots and it's thicket closer than a brother. They must have had perseverance as well as hatred. Then the floor is scratched and gouged and splintered. The plaster itself is dug out here and there and this great heavy bed which is all we found in the room looks as if it had been through the wars. But I don't mind it a bit. Only the paper. There comes John's sister, such a dear girl as she is and so careful of me I must not let her find me writing. She is a perfect and enthusiastic housekeeper and helps for no better profession. I verily believe she thinks it is the writing which made me sick. But I can write when she is out and see her a long way off from these windows. There is one that commands the road, a lovely shaded winding road and one that just looks off over the country. A lovely country too, full of great alms and velvet meadows. This wallpaper has a kind of sub-pattern in a different shade a particularly irritating one for you can only see it in certain light and not clearly then. But in the places where it isn't faded and where the sun is just so you can see a strange, provoking, formless sort of figure that seems to skulk about behind that silly and conspicuous front design. There's sister on the stairs. Well, the 4th of July is over. The people are gone and I am tired out. John thought it might do me good to see a little company so we just had mother and Nelly and the children down for a week. Of course I didn't do a thing. Jenny ceased to everything now. But it tired me all the same. John says if I don't pick up faster he shall send me to Weir Mitchell in the fall. But I don't want to go there at all. I'd a friend who was in his hands once and she says he is just like John and my brother only more so. Besides, it is such an undertaking to go so far. I don't feel as if it was worthwhile to turn my hand over for anything and I'm getting dreadfully fretful and quareless. I cry at nothing and cry most of the time. Of course I don't when John is here or anybody else but when I am alone. And I am alone a great deal just now. John is kept in town very often by serious cases and Jenny is good and lets me alone when I want her to. So I walk a little in the garden or down that lovely lane, sit on the porch under the roses and lie down up here a good deal. I'm getting into the room in spite of the wallpaper perhaps because of the wallpaper. It dwells in my mind so. I lie here on this great immovable bed. It is nailed down I believe and follow that pattern about by the hour. It is as good as gymnastics I assure you. I start we'll say at the bottom down in the corner over there where it has not been touched and I determine for the thousandth time that I will follow that pointless pattern to some sort of conclusion. I know a little of the principle of design and I know this thing was not arranged on any laws like radiation or alternation or repetition or symmetry or anything else that I ever heard of. It is repeated of course by the breaths but not otherwise. Looked at in one way each breath stands alone. The bloated curves and flourishes a kind of debased Romanesque with delirium tremens go waddling up and down in isolated columns of fatuity. But on the other hand they connect diagonally the sprawling outlines run off in great slanting waves of optic horror like a lot of wallowing seaweeds in full chase. The whole thing goes horizontally too. At least it seems so and I exhaust myself and try and distinguish the order of its going in that direction. They have used a horizontal breath for a freeze and that adds wonderfully to the confusion. There is one end of the room where it is almost intact and there when the crosslights fade and the low sun shines directly upon it I can almost fancy radiation after all. The interminable grotesques seem to form around a common center and rush off and headlong clunges of equal distraction. It makes me tired to follow it. I will take a nap I guess. I don't know why I should write this. I don't want to. I don't feel able. And I know John would think it absurd but I must say what I feel and think in some way it is such a relief. But the effort is getting to be greater than the relief. Half the time now I'm awfully lazy and lie down ever so much. John says I mustn't lose my strength and has me take cod liver oil and lots of tonics and things to say nothing of ale and wine and rare meat. Dear John, he loves me very dearly and hates to have me sick. I tried to have a real earnest reasonable talk with him the other day and tell him how I wish he would let me go and make a visit to cousin Henry and Julia. But he said I wasn't able to go nor able to stand it after I got there and I did not make out a very good case for myself for I was crying before I'd finished. It is getting to be a great effort for me to think straight. Just this nervous weakness I suppose. And dear John gathered me up in his arms and just carried me upstairs and laid me on the bed and sat by me and read to me till it tired my head. He said I was his darling and his comfort and all he had and that I must take care of myself for his sake and keep well. He says no one but myself can help me out of it that I must use my will and self-control and not let any silly fancies run away with me. There's one comfort. The baby is well and happy and does not have to occupy this nursery with the horrid wallpaper. If we had not used it that blessed child would have, what a fortunate escape. Why I wouldn't have a child of mine an impressionable little thing live in such a room for worlds. I never thought of it before but it is lucky that John kept me here after all. I can stand it so much easier than a baby you see. Of course I never mention it to them anymore. I am too wise but I keep watch of it all the same. There are things in that paper that nobody knows but me or ever will. Behind that outside pattern the dim shapes get clearer every day. It is always the same shape only very numerous and it is like a woman stooping down and creeping about behind that pattern. I don't like it a bit. I wonder, I begin to think. I wish John would take me away from here. It is so hard to talk with John out my case because he is so wise and because he loves me so. But I tried it last night. It was moonlight. The moon shines in all around just as the sun does. I hate to see it sometimes. It creeps so slowly and always comes in by one window or another. John was asleep and I hated to waken him so I kept still and watched the moonlight on that undulating wallpaper till I felt creepy. The faint figure behind seemed to shake the pattern just as if she wanted to get out. I got up softly and went to feel and see if the paper did move and when I came back John was awake. What is it little girl? he said. Don't go walking about like that. You'll get cold. I thought it was a good time to talk so I told him that I really was not gaining here and that I wished he would take me away. Why darling! said he. Our lease will be up in three weeks and I can't see how to leave before. The repairs are not done at home and I cannot possibly leave town just now. Of course if you were in any danger I could and would but you really are better dear whether you can see it or not. I am a doctor dear and I know you are gaining flesh and color your appetite is better I feel really much easier about you. I don't weigh a bit more said I nor as much and my appetite may be better in the evening when you are here but it is worse in the morning when you are away. Bless her little heart said he with a big hug she shall be as sick as she pleases but now let's improve the shining hours by going to sleep and talk about it in the morning. And you won't go away I asked gloomily. Why how can I dear it is only three weeks more and then we will take a nice little trip of a few days while Jenny is getting the house ready. Really dear you are better better in body perhaps I began and stopped short for he sat up straight and looked at me with such a stern reproachful look that I could not say another word. My darling said he I beg of you for my sake and for our child's sake as well as for your own that you will never for one instant let that idea enter your mind. There is nothing so dangerous so fastening to a temperament like yours it is a false and foolish fancy can you not trust me as a physician when I tell you so. So of course I said no more on that score and we went to sleep before long he thought I was asleep first but I wasn't and lay there for hours trying to decide with that front pattern and the back pattern really did move together or separately. On a pattern like this by daylight there is a lack of sequence a defiance of law that is a constant irritant to a normal mind. The color is hideous enough and unreliable enough and infuriating enough but the pattern is torturing. You think you've mastered it but just as you will get underway in following it turns a back somersault and there you are it slaps you in the face knocks you down and tramples upon you it is like a bad dream. The outside pattern is a Florida arabesque reminding one of a fungus. If you can imagine a toadstool in joints an interminable string of toadstools budding and sprouting in endless convolutions why that is something like it that is sometimes there is one marked peculiarity about this paper a thing no one seems to notice about myself and that is that it changes as the light changes. When the sun shoots in through the east window I always watch for that first long straight ray it changes so quickly that I never can quite believe it that is why I watch it always. By moonlight the moon shines in all night when there is a moon I wouldn't know it was the same paper. At night in any kind of light in twilight, candlelight, lamplight and worst of all by moonlight it becomes bars the outside pattern I mean and the woman behind it is as plain as can be I didn't realize for a long time what that thing was that showed behind that dim sub pattern but now I am quite sure it is a woman by daylight she is subdued quiet. I fancy it is the pattern that keeps her so still it is so puzzling it keeps me quiet by the hour I lie down ever so much now John says it is good for me and to sleep all I can indeed he started the habit by making me lie down for an hour after each meal it is a very bad habit I am convinced for you see I don't sleep and that cultivates deceit for I don't tell him I'm awake oh no the fact is I am getting a little afraid of John he seems very queer sometimes and even Jenny has an inexplicable look it strikes me occasionally just as a scientific hypothesis that perhaps it is the paper I have watched John when he did not know I was looking and come into the room suddenly on the most innocent excuses and I've caught him several times looking at the paper and Jenny too I caught Jenny with her hand on it once she didn't know I was in the room and when I asked her in a quiet a very quiet voice with the most restrained manner possible what she was doing with the paper she turned around as if she had been caught stealing and looked quite angry she asked me why I should frighten her so then she said that the paper stained everything it touched that she had found yellow smooches on all my clothes and John's and she wished we would be more careful did that not sound innocent but I know she was studying that pattern and I am determined that nobody shall find it out but myself life is very much more exciting now than it used to be you see I have something more to expect to look forward to, to watch better and I'm more quiet than I was John is so pleased to see me improve he laughed a little the other day and said I seemed to be flourishing in spite of my wallpaper I turned it off with a laugh I had no intention of telling him it was because of the wallpaper he would make fun of me he might even want to take me away I don't want to leave now until I have found it out there is a week more and I think that will be enough I'm feeling ever so much better I don't sleep much at night for it is so interesting to watch developments but I sleep a good deal in the daytime in the daytime it is tiresome and perplexing there are always new shoots on the fungus and new shades of yellow all over it I cannot keep count of them though I have tried conscientiously it is the strangest yellow that wallpaper it makes me think of all the yellow things I ever saw not beautiful ones like buttercups but old, foul bad yellow things but there is something else about that wallpaper the smell I noticed it the moment we came into the room but with so much air and sun it was not bad now that we have had a week of fog and rain and whether the windows are open or not the smell is here it creeps all over the house I find it hovering in the dining room skulking in the parlor hiding in the hall lying in wait for me on the stairs into my hair even when I go to ride if I turn my head suddenly and surprise it there is that smell such a peculiar odor too I've spent hours in trying to analyze it to find what it smelled like it is not bad at first and very gentle but quite the subtlest, most enduring odor I ever met in this damp weather it is awful I wake up in the night and find it hanging over me it used to disturb me at first I thought seriously of burning the house to reach the smell but now I am used to it the only thing I can think of that it is like is the color of the paper a yellow smell there is a very funny mark on this wall low down near the mop board a streak that runs around the room it goes behind every piece of furniture except the bed a long straight even smooch as if it had been rubbed over and over I wonder how it was done who did it and what they did it for round and round and round round and round and round it makes me dizzy I really have discovered something at last through watching so much at night when it changes so I have finally found out the front pattern does move and no wonder the woman behind shakes it sometimes I think there are great many women behind and sometimes only one she crawls around fast and her crawling shakes it all over then in the very bright spots she keeps still and in the very shady spots she just takes hold of the bars and shakes them hard and she is all the time trying to climb through but nobody could climb through that pattern it strangles so I think that is why it has so many heads they get through and then the pattern strangles them off and turns them upside down and makes their eyes white and when they are covered or taken off it would not be half so bad I think that woman gets out in the day time and I'll tell you why privately I've seen her I can see her out every one of my windows it is the same woman I know for she is always creeping and most women do not creep by daylight I see her on that long road under the trees creeping along and when a carriage comes she hides under the blackberry vines very humiliating to be caught creeping by daylight I always lock the door when I creep by daylight I can't do it at night for I know John would suspect something at once and John is so queer now that I don't want to irritate him I wish he would take another room besides I don't want anybody to get that woman out at night but myself I often wonder if I could see her out of all the windows at once but turn as fast as I can I can only see out of one at a time and though I always see her she may be able to creep faster than I can turn I have watched her sometimes away off in the open country creeping as fast as a cloud shadow in a high wind if only that top pattern could be gotten off from the under one I mean to try it little by little I have found out another thing but I shan't tell it this time it does not do to trust people too much there are only two more days to get this paper off and I believe John is beginning to notice I don't like to look in his eyes and I heard him ask Jenny a lot of professional questions about me she had a very good report to give she said I slept a good deal in the daytime John knows I don't sleep very well at night for I'm all so quiet he asked me all sorts of questions too and pretended to be very loving and kind as if I couldn't see through him still I don't wonder he acts so sleeping under this paper for three months only interests me but I feel sure John and Jenny are secretly affected by it this is the last night but it is enough John is to stay in town overnight and won't be out until this evening Jenny wanted to sleep with me this sly thing but I told her I should undoubtedly rest better for a night alone that was clever for really I wasn't alone a bit as soon as it was moonlight and that poor thing began to crawl and shake the pattern I got up and ran to help her she pulled and she shook I shook and she pulled and before morning we had peeled off yards of that paper a strip about as high as my head and half around the room and then when the sun came and that awful pattern began to laugh at me I declared I would finish it today we go away tomorrow and they are moving all my furniture down again to leave things as they were before Jenny looked at the wall in amazement but I told her merrily that I did it out of pure spite at the vicious thing she laughed and said she wouldn't mind doing it herself but I must not get tired how she betrayed herself that time but I am here and no person touches this paper but me not alive she tried to get me out of the room it was too patent but I said it was so quiet and empty and clean now that I believed I would lie down again and sleep all I could and not to wake me even for dinner I would call when I woke so now she is gone there is nothing left but that great bedstead nailed down with the canvas mattress we found on it we shall sleep downstairs tonight and take the boat home tomorrow I quite enjoy the room now that is bare again how those children did tear about here this bedstead is fairly nod but I must get to work I have locked the door and thrown the key down into the front path I don't want to go out and I don't want to have anybody come in till John comes to astonish him I've got a rope up here and that even Jenny didn't find if that woman does get out and tries to get away I can tie her but I forgot I could not reach far without anything to stand on this bed will not move I tried to lift and push it until I was lame and then I got so angry I bit off a little piece at one corner but it hurt my teeth then I peeled off all the paper I could reach standing on the floor it sticks horribly and the pattern just enjoys it all those strangled heads and bulbous eyes and waddling fungus growth just shriek with derision I'm getting angry enough to do something desperate to jump out the window would be admirable exercise but the bars are too strong even to try besides I wouldn't do it of course not I know well enough that a step like that is improper and might be misconstrued I don't want to look out the windows even there are so many of those creeping women and they creep so fast they all come out of the wallpaper as I did but I'm securely fastened now by my well hidden rope you don't get me out in the road there I suppose I shall have to go back behind the pattern when it comes night and that is hard it is so pleasant to be out in this great room and creep around as I please I don't want to go outside I won't even if Jenny asked me to for outside you have to creep on the ground and everything is green instead of yellow but here I can creep smoothly on the floor and that long smooch around the wall so I cannot lose my way why there's John at the door it is no use young man you can't open it how he does call in pound now he's crying for an axe it would be a shame to break down that beautiful door John dear I said in the gentlest voice the key is down by the front steps under a plantain leaf that silenced him for a few moments then he said very quietly indeed open the door my darling I can't said I the key is down by the front door under a plantain leaf and then I said it again several times very gently and slowly and said it so often that he had to go and see and he got it of course and came in he stopped short by the door what is the matter he cried for God's sakes what are you doing I just kept on creeping just the same but I looked at him over my shoulder I've got out at last said I in spite of you and Jane and I've pulled off most of the paper so you can't put me back now why should that man have fainted but he did and right across my path by the wall so that I had to creep over him every time end of the yellow wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman