Haunting gothic and chilling fable
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This is a spine-tingling (not necessarily in a good way!) long short story with hauntingly gothic imagery that shifts and stirs beneath a prosaic surface.
The female protagonist is confined to her room as a 'rest cure' which might be associated with what we now recognise as post-natal depression, but the enforced 'rest' that is more akin to imprisonment releases something in her psyche that might be madness...
The yellow wallpaper of the title is both a kind of fairy-tale mirror and a window to another world that allows the narrator to see the female figures caught beneath it and living out their lives beneath its shadows, an incredibly haunting and indicting imagery for Victorian England.
This is only short (more a long short story than a novella) but it will stay with you for all that.
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Haunting tale
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This is a disturbing tale about a young woman's treatment by her husband. What we now know as post-natal depression was in those days treated as madness. Her husband has had her confined to a room with yellow patterned wallpaper after she has her first baby. Her only way of expressing her feelings is to write them down, but she has to do so in secret as her husband has forbidden it. She thinks there is a person underneath the wallpaper trying to get out and we can feel the desperation in her writing as she struggles to understand what is happening to her. This has a bone chilling ending which will haunt my mind forever.
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Tales of a Lunatic
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Focusing on The Yellow Wallpaper alone, this novel is wonderful. Our protagonist is a woman stifled by her husband, also a doctor, who doesnt allow her to write and believes her passion for writing has made her mad. He locks her in the highest room in the house with the famous Yellow Wallpaper where most of the story takes place. It is a tale of an incarcerated woman who stays awake by night to see the caged figure in the wallpaper that 'shakes the bars' by moonlight, hence her lunacy.
The book is a large component fir Gilbert and Gubar's 'The Madwoman In The Attic' and frankly, i love it!!
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