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Judged By Its Cover: The Yellow Wallpaper

I saw this book’s cover before knowing what Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s The Yellow Wallpaper was about and thought it was quite mundane and just a little bit ugly. After picking it up later and actually bothering to read it, I saw it in a different way.

Once you know the nature of this short story – a collection of journal entries written by a woman confined to her bedroom by her husband, and in a state of nervous depression that leads to psychosis and a paranoid obsession with the wallpaper – the staid print now conjures up her sense of fear and entrapment.

Oppressively intricate and sickly yellow, even the whirlpool swirl in the bottom left threatens to draw one in – just as the narrator comes to believe that she has been imprisoned in the wallpaper by the end of the book.

I now find that this cover draws its strength from both its mundanity and its heavily detailed and insipid ugliness. The first seems to reflect the suffocating boredom prescribed to her as a treatment which only leads her deeper into depression, and the second, with the layering and twists and turns of the pattern, seems to relate to the irrational thought processes which confuse and come to gain control over her mind.

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