The Yellow Wallpaper, Paperback/Charlotte Perkins Gilman

The Yellow Wallpaper is a psychological short story about a Victorian woman on the edge of a nervous breakdown. When her husband deems she needs a "rest cure" after the birth of their child, they rent an abandoned colonial mansion with a "queer air" about it. The narrator's claustrophobic room has unpleasant, oppressive yellow wallpaper which incites her decent into madness. Charlotte Gilman's stylistic short story is an important early American feminist text, illustrating patriarchal attitudes in the early 20th century toward women's health, both physical and mental.