It is the room’s wallpaper, a “repellant” and “smouldering unclean yellow”, with “sprawling flamboyant patterns committing every artistic sin” that forms the centrepiece of the story. Perhaps, the narrator muses, it had once been a nursery or playroom. The wallpaper is torn, the floor scratched and gouged. The room her husband selects as their bedroom, though large, airy and bright, is barred at the window and furnished with a bed that is bolted to the floor. The house is “queer”, long abandoned and isolated. There she is to rest, take tonics, air and exercise – and absolutely forbidden to engage in intellectual work until well again. The narrator is brought by her physician husband to a summer retreat in the countryside to recover from her “temporary nervous depression – a slight hysterical tendency”. Gilman’s short story is a straightforward one.
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