The Yellow Wallpaper: Crash Course Literature 407

Today on Crash Course Literature, John Green teaches you about The Yellow Wallpaper, by Charlotte Perkins Gilman. The Yellow Wallpaper tells the story of a woman who is a prisoner in her own home, in the name of caring for her mental health. The narrator stares all day the yellow wallpaper

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[MegaChickenfish]

I'm disappointed that my school never pointed out that this was *based on a true story.* Or at least a real "treatment" that people were being subjected to at the time.

[ez]

I think it's interesting you didn't mention Jenny at all. She also lives in the house and spends time with the narrator, but because she's John's sister, she wholeheartedly believes the narrator is sick. I'm thinking she's a metaphor for those who don't realize they're oppressed and still agree with the oppressors. When you're trying to get better or get reform, it isn't always the oppressors that cause the most damage, it's the people who're like you and still don't fight back.

[evilqueen]

An ex-boyfriend of mine said the main character in this story reminded him of me and now knowing what the story is about I’m extremely concerned.

[nikkigriffin]

I just finished reading the yellow wallpaper and Immediately turned on this video to try to contextualize/ make sense of what I just read. And only after the intro did I realize that the walls of the room in my uni are a weird pale yellow

[OctagonalGolbat]

The irony of having to read this novella for school while we're all isolated in our homes... don't know whether to laugh or cry.

[jflag]

One thing I always took from this story, especially because of the unreliable narrator, is that she had been the woman she saw in the wall. The groove that she eventually finds herself following was of her own making. She had been doing the "creeping" for quite a while, not at all realizing that who she was seeing was herself. That was the most terrifying part of it for me. Additionally, because she would have been touching the wall so much at that point, the smell would of course have been following her.

[jessesikes]

This was, with out a doubt John's most personal video. You can feel his pain and triumph. I love it.

[devon]

I wrote an essay comparing Bertha from Jane Eyre and the woman in the Yellow Wallpaper (the whole "Madwoman in the Attic" theme) and it is by far my favorite essay I've written in college; love these two stories and how they connect.

[Kittyhalk]

Man I remember we read this in a summer writing class I took at a community college and it was handled so poorly. As someone who has suffered from depression I found myself really relating to the narrator, but all the professor had to say literally amounted to "lol it's a horror story because she's crazy and kills her husband. That's all there is to it she's just craaaazy." I felt gutted and honestly really hurt. I wanted to say something about how insensitive that interpretation was to those who suffered from mental illness, but between my shock and the worry that maybe I had missed something, that she (and by extension myself) was crazy after all kept me quiet. It's a minor thing but I still regret my silence. Needless to say I was glad when that course was over and I got the credit I needed to leave.

[StCrimson]

I read "The Yellow Wallpaper" in high school, but my teacher totally didn't explain it well to any of us because we all just thought it was weird and nonsensical. And, as someone who suffers from mental illness, I really relate to this kind of story because it reflects my experiences with mental illness and my realization that the worse thing that can be done to mentally ill people is to isolate them because it removes all healthy frame of reference from our world which causes us to begin to believe the things that our minds are telling us and leaves us with no way to pull ourselves out of our own toxic ways of thinking.

[elsa]

Crash Course Literature is my favourite series on YouTube.

[curiousworld]

I first read this story when I was 12 years old. The gender role/mental illness subtext understandably eluded me at the time - I simply found it to be one of the most frightening things I'd ever read (my mother never kept me from reading anything I could actually read). As an adult, I clearly recognized the greater meaning of the story, but still find it one of most disturbing stories I've read. God knows, I'll never hear the word 'creep' again without a shudder.

[fishdish]

“Rest Cure” literally is just isolation. It is a form of torture. The truest form of madness for a human being. :(

[dianadegracia]

My mom is a doctor and she pretty much was my John when I felt like I had ADHD, and was struggling to cope with it and still meet her expectations. She would also never let me go out as a child and only drag me out on her terms. I very much felt like "jane".

[SunnyDragonfly]

One thing that the ending reminded me of when I read it was the way that animals in a zoo pace and fixate when they are understimulated

[alainastone]

I regularly teach this story in my junior English class with the full lit crit treatment. The only story that both freaks them out and fascinates them more is "A Rose for Emily".

[rainydaylady]

When I read this I thought it was the saddest story I'd ever read.

[EdmundDesigns]

I read this in undergrad, shortly after suffering from postpartum depression for 2 years. Reading The Yellow Wallpaper was so raw and real for me. Charlotte really speaks to those feelings and others in my class completely missed the mental aspect of the story she tells. Its one of the best short stories I've ever read.

[owencutler]

We’re about to read this in English. Thanks so much John!

[merrigalebeddoes]

I, too, was deeply affected by this story when I first read it (and every time I have read it since). For as long as I can remember, I have suffered from bipolar disorder and mild agoraphobia, which went undiagnosed until postpartum depression exacerbated it to where I needed to get help. I now live with my daughter, also bipolar, and my parents' nine cats. We moved in with my parents years ago to help my mother look after my father who had Alzheimer's disease. After he died, it was not long before she, too, suffered from dementia. She passed away just before this past Halloween. i became aware, then, that for more than two years i had only been out of the house to get to or from the car to run errands. My prison had been just as real as the narrator's in the story, but I think it was of my own making. It is one of those instances where I had seen a phenomenon in someone else, even a fictional character, but had failed to recognize it when it happened to me. In the story, the narrator sees the woman in the wallpaper creeping about the edges of the room, and even creeping about outside in the garden. That always seemed to me to represent the narrator's desire and need to try to escape, and her fear of actually doing so. I know just how that feels. Sorry to have run on so long, but the story still gets to me, even just hearing someone talk about it.