Welcome back to the Lovecraft reread, in which two modern Mythos writers get girl cooties all over old Howard’s sandbox, from those who inspired him to those who were inspired in turn.
Today we’re looking at Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper,” first published in the January 1892 issue of The New England Magazine.
Spoilers ahead.
“I know a little of the principle of design, and I know this thing was not arranged on any laws of radiation, or alternation, or repetition, or symmetry, or anything else that I ever heard of. It is repeated, of course, by the breadths, but not otherwise. Looked at in one way each breadth 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, and the sprawling outlines run off in great slanting waves of optic horror, like a lot of wallowing seaweeds in full chase.”
Summary
Unnamed narrator (UN) and her physician husband John have taken a colonial mansion with extensive grounds for the summer. She wonders why it’s been unoccupied for so long, and why they’ve gotten it so cheaply. She’d like to think the place romantically haunted, but practical John laughs at such superstition.
UN is not supposed to be “working”—that is, writing—but this secretly scrawled narrative relieves her. Though John refuses to think her “sick,” he admits she’s suffering from nervous depression and slight hysterical tendencies. Exercise and fresh air (and various drugs) will soon set her up. It’s for fresh air that John picked the top floor bedroom. It has windows all around and was evidently used as a nursery, then a playroom: the windows are barred, you see, and there are rings in the walls, and the wallpaper is stripped off in places, as if by rambunctious children.
Or did the children hate the wallpaper as much as she grows to? A student of design herself, UN can find no aesthetic order in its uncertain curves and angles and bulbous bits like staring eyes. It’s full of “great slanting waves of optic horror,” a “debased Romanesque with delirium tremens” that “goes waddling up and down in isolated columns of fatuity.” As for the color! It’s far from the cheerful yellow of sunlight and buttercups. Where it’s faded, it’s unclean. In other places it’s “a dull yet lurid orange” or a “sickly sulphur.”
In the moonlight, the paper seems to have a faint back pattern, a woman who creeps behind the fungous bars of the fore pattern and shakes them, as if trying to escape.
Dear John won’t accede to her pleas to switch rooms or leave the house altogether. She’s letting dangerous fancy enter her mind. For his sake, and that of their recently born child (whom she can’t bear to be around), she must control her imagination!
Imagination, eh? Hasn’t she caught John and his sister Jennie staring at the wallpaper? Jennie claims it’s because John and UN’s clothing often has yellow “smooches” on it from brushing the paper. They should be careful about that.
UN continues to study the wallpaper. In addition to growing new mushroomy tendrils and shifting the tones of its yellows, it exudes a yellow smell that pervades the house and clings to her hair. And what’s that rub-mark near the floor, that circles the whole room except behind the bed? (The bed, she notes, which is nailed down.)
At night the woman behind the fore pattern—or is it many women?—crawls very fast, shakes the bars, and pokes her head through the twining fungus only to be strangled white-eyed by it. During the day she seems to get out, for UN can spy her out of every window, always creeping along, sometimes “fast as a cloud shadow in a high wind.”
John asks questions and pretends to be loving and kind. When he’s away, Jennie offers to sleep with UN. UN sends her off so she can help the woman behind the wallpaper break free. UN pulls and the woman pushes; UN pushes and the woman pulls. Before morning, they’ve stripped off yards of paper. Next day UN locks the door and keeps stripping. The day after, she and John will leave the house, just as UN starts to enjoy her room’s bareness. She can’t reach the paper nearest the ceiling, alas, and can’t move the bed. Look how gnawed it is. She bites it herself in her rage. Why, she’s angry enough to jump out a window, but the windows are barred; besides, that’s a step that could be misconstrued.
Outside women creep, and creep fast. Did they come out of the wallpaper like UN did in spite of John’s (and Jane’s) opposition? Will she have to get back behind the pattern at night? She doesn’t want to creep outside, where it’s green, not yellow. She wants to keep creeping around the walls, her shoulder to the yellow smooch. It fits there so nicely.
John comes and threatens to break down the door. UN tells him where she’s thrown the key outside, repeating her instructions very gently and slowly until he must go fetch it.
When John comes into the room, she’s creeping. She looks over her shoulder and tells him she’s escaped in spite of him. Plus she’s pulled down most of the paper, so he can’t put her back behind it!
Now why should that man faint right across her path by the wall, so she has to creep over him every time!
What’s Cyclopean: The most interesting word choice in this story may be the “smooch” of yellow that streaks around the wall. Such an… affectionate… term, under most circumstances.
The Degenerate Dutch: In which the case is made that patriarchy is considerably creepier than any elder god.
Mythos Making: Gilman beats Chambers by three years on the terror of the color yellow, and Lovecraft by about three decades on the terrors of fungus and geometry.
Libronomicon: You shouldn’t write; it will only excite your fancies.
Madness Takes Its Toll: The titular wallpaper appears to have all the sanity-destroying powers later attributed to the Necronomicon.
Anne’s Commentary
What is it about the color yellow that inspires famously unreliable narrators? There’s “The King in Yellow,” and now “The Yellow Wallpaper.” Yellow! A cheerful sounding word, right? Almost like “hello.” Rhymes with “mellow.” It’s the color of so many flowers, not only buttercups but marigolds and dandelions and lilies and roses and goldenrod. It’s the color of our sun, and of wheat fields under the sun, and of exotic spices from sunny lands, like saffron and turmeric.
But Nature also chooses yellow for “old, foul, bad” things. Jaundiced skin. Stained teeth. Predator eyes peering out of jungle foliage. Pus. Those nasty puddles that leak out of overstuffed dumpsters. You have to be really careful when you mix up some yellow. A touch too much green (or blue), you’ve got slime or ichor. A touch too much red, you’ve got a “lurid” orange or sulphur, a rotten egg yolk.
The wallpaper in our story has all the icky tones of yellow. It’s like the mottled hide of an old woman dying of hepatitis, and hey, there’s actually a woman behind it, or the soul of a woman, or the souls of all women penned in until they go mad, sometimes with quiet resignation, sometimes floridly, as here. Appropriately, she in an attic, and the attic windows are barred (not for the safety of children, after all), and the floors are splintered and the plaster gouged and the bedstead gnawed (not by rollicking naughty boys) but by a lunatic. In Supernatural Horror in Literature, Lovecraft suggests that Gilman’s UN finds herself in the cell of a former madwoman. Yes, good husband and noted physician John didn’t pick this vacation house for its views, nice as they are. He picked it for the proper accommodation of his postpartum bride, who’s proven to be no nice presentable Victorian Madonna. Nope. She’s an emotional wreck, but not “sick.” Never call her sick to her face. She couldn’t handle it. Her congenitally overwrought imagination would spin out of control. While we’re at it, no more writing for her. No more hanging out with her stimulating cousins Henry and Julia. Just air and quiet and that wallpaper.
So, is UN the only madwoman ever to occupy this attic? Was there another? Is there STILL another madwoman, spiritually steeped into the paper, waiting for a susceptible body and mind to usurp? Or is it just UN’s pathological fancy that creates the woman, the women, only to be “possessed” by her or them?
It’s not an easy question to answer. How far can we trust UN? Her narrative reads like that of an educated and lively-minded woman, writer and artist, just the sort of companion to be esteemed by cousins Henry and Julia. Violets and lilacs may go well with yellow, but Gilman’s prose here wears no complementary purple. UN’s writing is straightforward, colloquial, vivid in its descriptions, often wry or even ironic in its tone. It’s a downright relief to get so many paragraph breaks — UN must be sane, to break paragraphs so astutely. Yeah, if that damn John wasn’t so dense a physician and husband, she’d be fine. Her instincts are right—she needs activity and stimulation and work, not seclusion and overbearing physic, including who knows what drugs? With all her “tonics,” no wonder she’s too weary to write or do anything but lie around and stare at the walls.
And the paper.
John’s either incompetent, for all his “high standing,” or he’s gaslighting UN!
Or not? Just because UN comes off as smart and talented doesn’t mean she can’t be paranoid, too. And on the verge of psychosis.
Then there’s the overarching theme of women socially trapped and restrained, which idea UN projects into the wallpaper. That theme works fine whether one thinks UN is indeed on the verge of psychosis at story start, then pushed over the verge by mistreatment; or whether one thinks UN was right that the house is strange, that it’s truly haunted, and by a ghost that will ultimately possess UN. Possess her to the point where she doesn’t recognize John, but refers to him as “that man” who’s blocking her creep-path.
I always like the supernatural alternatives in stories like these. Yeah, I want there to really be a King in Yellow, not just a crazy man who believes in the King. Yeah, I want there to be ghosts in the wallpaper, ghosts creeping in the road and hiding under blackberry bushes and cruising across the open country like cloud shadows! Or the one ghost, so fast it looks like many ghosts. Cool! Think of “The Yellow Wallpaper” made in the modern cinematic style of fast-forwards and jump-cuts, of cameras that wander across mundane rooms or landscapes, only to suddenly pan into the horror! Or has that been done already?
The creeping women so creep me out.
Oh, and I can relate to UN about the seductive weirdness of certain wallpapers. I put one up in the breakfast room that in the sample looked like innocent vines and apples and forget-me-nots in the style of William Morris. But once there were large expanses of this stuff, I started seeing voluptuous female torsos accompanied by stylized uteruses complete with ovary-apples and sinuous Fallopian tube branches and blue-flower spermatozoa. And that can get just a wee bit psychosexual before one’s had one’s coffee, don’t you know.
Still like it, though. Would probably also like the Yellow Wallpaper, if I could get used to the background woman shaking the foreground all night. Blackout curtains could be the solution—no moonlight or other animating illumination! Too bad John would have nixed curtains as too much of an expense for a mere summer rental.
Ruthanna’s Commentary
The last time I read “Wallpaper,” it was the token feminist story in my high school literature textbook. Strange aeons later, I remembered the feminism—overt enough to be comprehensible to teenagers in an era before “gaslighting” was discussed daily on Tumblr. And I remembered the madness-versus-the-supernatural ambiguity, a trope for which I had considerably less patience at the time. I did not remember how utterly, claustrophobicly creeptastic the thing is.
Plus, in high school, I had a lot less experience with patronizing gaslighters. Now, after helping a few friends through a few traumatic divorces, I’ve seen the point where you ask yourself: is this relationship actually less horrible than having a partner who steals your body to summon shoggoths? “Wallpaper” is all about that fine, fine line. At some level, it doesn’t matter whether Jane is possessed by the non-Euclidean décor, or driven from postpartum depression into dissociative mania by her husband’s “care.” The visceral horror is just as nasty either way.
If it is a horror story, what’s going on? Jane starts with the ‘fancy’ of a haunted house—the inevitable suggestion, given the gothic tradition of the time. The “nursery,” however, suggests a different aspect of gothic horror, and one that Lovecraft drew on decades later. Bars on the windows, rings on the walls, gouges all around and bed bolted to the floor… if children ever lived there, they were Whateleys. But the attic’s also the traditional place to lock “mad” relatives, especially female ones.
As for the woman in the wallpaper herself, who delights in creeping—“ghost” seems like far too simple a term. I suppose she could be the spirit of the room’s previous inhabitant. Or she could be the wallpaper itself. The fungous, seaweed-like wallpaper with patterns and angles no human eye can sanely follow—and the very act of trying gives them power. It’s an old gothic tradition, after all, for the house itself to be a character. It’s not much of a stretch for part of the house to be the eldritch horror.
I’ll just note that the usual Victorian methods for dyeing wallpaper yellow involved neurotoxins. So it’s maybe not weird that the color ended up with such nasty associations.
Even taking the wallpaper as a literal and supernatural brown note, John’s role as precipitating jerkwad is vital. The constraints he places on his wife make sympathy with the imprisoned creeper inevitable. Perhaps they also make the space behind the wallpaper seem like a tempting escape in its own right, enough to facilitate the exchange, or possession, or whatever the hell is going on at the end.
The tropes born here will play out across several literary traditions, from mainstream feminist literature to straightforward haunted house stories. In the Mythosian line, Chambers’ King in Yellow stories appear only three years later, featuring a play with similar effects to Gilman’s wallpaper. Lovecraft’s narrators suffer gothicly whenever they come near an ancestral manse. And John and Jane’s marriage reminds me strongly of Asenath and Edward’s. Lovecraft depicts a lot of unhealthy relationships—but more often they involve one partner tempting the other into complicity with unspeakable acts. It’s in “Thing on the Doorstep” that we see a relationship as a quelling thing, something that forces one member to literally suppress their selfhood.
As horror grows more psychologically sophisticated in the decades following, this dynamic will grow more common. All too often, the greatest threats to sanity, life, and limb, come from those with whom we’re most intimate. Once you’ve reached that point, the veil that keeps normal life separate from horror is already pierced—evil spirits and elder gods won’t have any trouble joining the mix.
Next week, in Stephen King’s “Crouch End,” we learn that elder gods make terrible landlords.
Ruthanna Emrys’s neo-Lovecraftian novelette “The Litany of Earth” is available on Tor.com, along with the more recent but distinctly non-Lovecraftian “Seven Commentaries on an Imperfect Land” and “The Deepest Rift.” Winter Tide, a novel continuing Aphra Marsh’s story from “Litany,” will be available from the Tor.com imprint in April 2017. Ruthanna can frequently be found online on Twitter and Livejournal, and offline in a mysterious manor house with her large, chaotic household—mostly mammalian—outside Washington DC.
Anne M. Pillsworth’s short story. “The Madonna of the Abattoir” appears on Tor.com. Her first novel, Summoned, is available from Tor Teen along with the recently released sequel Fathomless. She lives in Edgewood, a Victorian trolley car suburb of Providence, Rhode Island, uncomfortably near Joseph Curwen’s underground laboratory.
All rest and no writing makes Charlotte a dull girl, Dr. Mitchell…
Lovecraft on Gilman: from “Supernatural Horror in Literature”:
“Charlotte Perkins Gilman, in “The Yellow Wall Paper”, rises to a classic level in subtly delineating the madness which crawls over a woman dwelling in the hideously papered room where a madwoman was once confined.”
Recommended reading: “On “The Yellow Wallpaper””, the section of Joanna Russ’s To Write Like a Woman where she derides the limited academic view of canonical literature (“Why do so many scholars read so little?”).
Currently reading:
Over half-way through the third edition (the core mythos stories are found in all three versions) and tracking Bloch’s rapid progress from imitating Lovecraft to developing his own style: particularly recommended to those readers who are interested in Egyptian mythology and the worship of Nyarlathotep.
As a sample, the introductory information by Robert M. Price is available online: http://www.chaosium.com/mysteries-of-the-worm-introduction/.
Today’s birthday: Donald Wandrei (1908-1987), co-founder of Arkham House.
As a survivor of some vile family crap, I can second the part about the worst threats coming from people closest to you. Same thing for creepy patterns or decor–I once was in the apartment of a dorm RA who had a print or lithograph on the wall, an abstract of some sort, very simple, a veering curve or two with varying line width, and it just wasn’t easy to look at somehow. Even taking into account that the RA was even creepier. Long story short, I changed schools, for several reasons besides that.
The Bloch collection–I remember mainly “The Unspeakable Betrothal”, in which the protag finds the eerie alien forces friendlier and more interesting than the people around her. That said people find her body missing instead of her head, didn’t add up for me; I thought I had found a sort of kindred spirit there for a while.
Ah yes, the “rest cure.” Just the thing for quelling those hysterical wombs.
The story becomes creepier when you find out how much of it was based on the author’s own experiences. Like the narrator, when she was suffering post-partum depression, she was forced to take a rest-cure with no writing, activity, or anything vaguely resembling mental stimulation. She later said the treatment had nearly driven her mad and that both her husband and her physician had treated her with intolerable cruelty.
It was a common belief about madness at the time that it came from mental overexertion and that women were especially vulnerable to it (this was actually an argument used in limiting women’s educations). Sexism aside, how long was it before doctors latched onto the idea of doing studies to see a treatment worked?
On the ghost/monster/delusion front, I do have to wonder about John’s reaction at the end. Is he really the sort of person faint at the sight of some torn wallpaper and a woman crawling around the room? Or (like a good, little, Lovecraftian protagonist), has he fainted at the sight of something too horrible to see and remain sane?
And can we just enjoy the fact that mental over-stimulation, what John says is the UN’s problem, was believed to be a cause of fainting? As well as being a traditionally “feminine” response to a crisis?
Of course, since he remains unconscious as the UN–or what has replaced/taken over the UN–repeatedly crawls over him, something a bit worse than a shock to the nerves may have happened. I’ve always wondered if the UN is creeping over a corpse at the end.
Wallpaper that drives one mad? Perhaps that’s what TKIY was missing, lawl. But if you want to see a great flick involving madness and incredible wallpaper, look for A Tale of Two Sisters, the original.
I had a class on this short story. I’m glad to see it mentioned here, as all the students and teachers took the comment on the “nursery” at face value. Such naivety… Lovecraft’s interpretation was so obvious to me! A cinematic version was mentioned in that class.
@@.-@: On Perkins Gilman and the rest cure, I really liked this article. Weir Mitchell never acknowledged that it was this story that made him change his opinion on his rest cure, but he did stop prescribing it after reading it.
@2: I think Bloch was going for a “The Whisperer in Darkness” style ending with the face on the pillow: I agree it doesn’t quite work. I think Bloch’s best Lovecraftian story overall is “Notebook Found in a Deserted House”. I also like the idea behind “Fane of the Black Pharaoh”, though young Bloch felt the need to give the “shock” ending more telegraphing than a Western Union office.
@@.-@ & 6: I found this article interesting, not least because it records that Mitchell prescribed some of his male patients the “West cure” of riding and hunting in the Badlands, leading me to imagine a timeline where Gilman talked Mitchell into letting her try it and became an acclaimed author of feminist westerns…
Ellynne @@@@@ 4: Interesting ideas about the cause of John’s fainting spell. Is it an ironic comment on his not-so-imperturbable-after-all maleness? Does he finally see what lies behind or within the wallpaper? Or some terrible transformation in his wife’s face?
I’ve been known, in blacker moods, to think she killed him somehow and the corpse fell in an inconvenient place.
Oh, and just thought about it. She can’t keep crawling all the time, because she has to take a break to write all this stuff down, right? And yet the closing action seems so immediate and continuous. A little narrative speedbump, although the narrator’s peculiar state of mind could explain it, I suppose.
Schuyler @@@@@ 1: What is that delightful creature on the Bloch cover? He’s all like, hey, I’ve got a rib cage that’s practically exoskeletal, and YOU don’t.
@8: I’m not sure. The artist, Steven Gilberts, gives this picture the file name “Happy Dance” on his website, which is quite wonderful. Here’s a version without text. (It’s from another website but preserves the Happy Dance title.)
Yay, Crouch End! Thank you!
@@.-@: I’m glad you mentioned that. I remember reading “The Yellow Wallpaper” for more than one of my college courses, and in one of them (Female Writers of Science Fiction, if I remember right), we discussed in depth how Gilman’s personal experience led her to write this story. I think that revelation haunted me more than the story itself, and has led me to appreciate it more as a result.
I wonder if the house was once inhabited by a female Roulet…
I remember reading this once ages ago. I always felt like there might actually be something toxic in the walls and the wallpaper itself, though I suppose that’s a really uncreative answer. Still, it’s one that scares me. So many hauntings have been linked to gas leaks. Invisible killers are real.
SchuylerH @@@@@ 1: Lovecraft’s explanation is interesting, but I think it says more about him than about Gilman’s story. Contagious madness was one of his greatest fears; it makes sense that he’d see it here.
Anne @@@@@ 8: You’re right! It’s as unlikely as the scrawled “Aaaahhhhhh!” in “Hounds of Tindalos.” But somehow it doesn’t bother me. I think that as the narration subtly shifts from Jane to her replacement, I just assumed the narration was no longer actually being written–though the speaker might imagine that she’s writing. The whole story has less of a ‘found manuscript’ feel, and more the feel of an internal monologue, parts of which happen to have also been put down on paper. But I may just be making excuses for a story I think deserves them.
Flicker @@@@@ 13: One of the things I really like about this story is that it works regardless of the explanation. So many stories make the reality of their supernatural component ambiguous, but are only interesting if the supernatural is in fact real. “Wallpaper” remains a fascinating, terrifying, creepy story regardless of interpretation.
Personally, I had flashbacks to “The Colour out of Space”. In there, Nabby perceives something her husband and children don’t, and eventually she is locked up in the attic and reduced to crawling:
and in “The Yellow Wallpaper”, don’t these parts sound surprisingly like the Colour itself, secretly affecting the inhabitants? And also in Lovecraft’s stories, “By Their smell can men sometimes know Them near”.
Seriously, did nobody else think of The Shunned House?
In Joanna Russ’s To Write Like a Woman: “On the Fascination of Horror Stories, Including Lovecraft’s” also references “The Yellow Wallpaper”:
““The Yellow Wallpaper” deals with issues of autonomy, separation, and individuation by creating a powerful horror-story image (the other self coming out from behind the wallpaper). The story is political protest. It is also a horror story and has been anthologised as “pure” horror. I read it at fifteen and it scared me; when I re-read it at thirty-five I was amazed that I had so completely missed the feminist message. I then gave it to my women’s studies class, and it scared them.”
(This entire essay is brilliant and I want to quote the whole thing.)
It was only when I went to college several years later that I learned that this story could be interpreted as supernatural horror. Frankly, I’ve always read it as being about a woman going mad due to a barbaric cure propagated by her uncaring jerky husband.
Still one of my favorites, though.
I first read this story when I was 14 or 15 and I still have a nauseated sensation when I think of it. Basically because from the start I took it as the journal of a mind going insane. I never even considered the possibility that it might be a ghost story, and I still don’t.
Coming back to this article of the reread, years later, I’m surprised none of us ever followed up on this comment by Flicker @13:
It occurred to me just now, rereading it, that the 1800s, besides the toxic patriarchy, gaslights, and gaslighting, was also a time of literally poisonous wallpaper emitting literally poisonous smells. There were some highly toxic – but very lovely colored – arsenic pigments and dyes in use both in clothing and wallpaper, among other things. Of course coming into direct contact with the dyes could poison you, but under the wrong circumstances, it’s been claimed the pigments could actually break down and emit arsine gas. The most popular arsenic pigments (and wallpapers) were a brilliant green (Scheele’s Green) but the first link below also includes some lovely yellow wallpaper designs:
https://hyperallergic.com/329747/death-by-wallpaper-alluring-arsenic-colors-poisoned-the-victorian-age/
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/books/what-to-read/could-this-wallpaper-kill-you-victorian-britains-lethal-obsessio/
To round out the Lovecraftian tropes, there’s also a frighteningly-titled-potentially-deadly book involved. In 1874 an American doctor and professor of chemistry set out to raise awareness of the dangers of arsenic wallpaper with his book ‘Shadows From The Walls of Death’ containing over 100 samples of the poisonous wallpaper.
Of course, if you were to handle the book carelessly, and lick your fingers as you turned the pages….
https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/shadows-from-the-walls-of-death-book
There are only a few copies left – the Atlas Obscura link says most of the books were destroyed, as libraries became aware of just how dangerous it could be for readers to handle them.
Anyhow, rereading the reread and the comments it suddenly occurred to me to wonder if Charlotte Gilman had come across this, or references to it, and if it may have been another influence on the story.
The NIH has a scan of the book online, at the link above in the quote from the article:
https://collections.nlm.nih.gov/catalog/nlm:nlmuid-0234555-bk
Arsenic wallpaper is one of those real-world Lovecraftian things that’s… really all too easy to believe, given our ongoing willingness as a species to poison ourselves for beauty or convenience. If the spawn of Azathoth really do show up, we’ll be making perfume out of their slime in no time.
@21, Ms Emrys,
Aniline dye was used for clothing. Litharge — lead (II) oxide — was added to wine as a sweetener well after the danger of lead poisoning was known. Radium was added to energy drinks and makeup during the early to mid-twentieth century. Vendors have long demonstrated that killing people for profit is behavior they are quite willing to perform, even after the dangers of a product are known.
SwampYankee @@@@@ 22: Yep. And if you haven’t read Brooke Bolander’s The Only Harmless Great Thing yet, it’s an incredible take on the radium thing. Plus bonus sapient elephants.
Yes Anne Pillsworth, it has been done. I made an animated version hybrid set in modern times in 2013-2014 to be set in 2012 and 1892 when Charlotte first wrote it. But I am still editing it. I ran out of funds and we shot 101 scenes that take place in both era’s. There are all the creepers you can imagine and a John now called Shawn. Charlotte is now Scarlett and Jenny is called Jewels or Jwlhyfer. We hope to finally record and edit it before the end of the year. It is called The Paper Wall penned by me, Kim Gelvin, and Charlotte Perkins Gilman. I wrote it after living with not one but now two mentally unstable intelligent husbands. My role is of the advocate (Jewels) and Scarlett is a female version of a person with mental illness. Shawn is the ineffectual uncaring Doctor who thinks he can fix it with a pill, not really knowing what he is doing (like many G.P,’s). Anyways keep a lookout for my film and thank you, I loved finding this while re adding lines from UN’s “debased Romanesque” comments. Amazed that I can add 13000 characters here if I want to. Contact me if you like. This has been a passion production since 2002 when I had a staged reading in Australia. I was going to shoot my film in real life in 2006 but then someone In the USA took part of my script and character ideas and tried to make a version of The Yellow Wallpaper. It sucked but managed to get on Netflix. Figures. Anyways, the 1970’s version is awesome. I have wanted to do a version since the 1980’s when I first read the short story while in College in America, my home country.Then after my experiences with my unwell first husband I thought it very important to the health of those feeling suicidal to make this film. I hope to help those without a voice. And the advocates trying to understand mental illness. And for those who are unaware they are unwell. Ok gotta get back to the final edit. Cheers and stay well out there, Kim Gelvin from ART HOUSE FILMS Australia