The Yellow Wallpaper

My high school held a contest every year for dramatic reading. Students were to pick some piece of literature and learn to read it with drama and inflection and had to finish within a very strict time limit. I was lucky in high school that in my senior year, I had a sister who was a freshman. She is a very dramatic person. I had never considered entering this contest in my previous three years of high school, but in her very first year, she had signed up to compete on the very first day the contest was announced. She brought home this incredible short story by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, titled The Yellow Wallpaper. I stayed uninterested in this contest until I heard my sister read this piece -- and then I had to have it. My sister is so nice to me -- she really should have told me to shove it -- that she let me start practicing with this story to read it for the competition. Throughout the story, the narrator loses her mind and her demise is brought on by some wretched wallpaper in the room to which she's confined. This is a dramatic short story. I read it and practiced it at home, in my english class, and for anyone that I could make sit still for the very strict 5 or 6 minute time limit. At the competition, I gave it my all (the key is under a plantain leaf! UNDER A PLANTAIN LEAF!), but was disqualified because I was a few seconds over time.

Two or three years later I learned that Charlotte Perkins Gilman was a prominent feminist in the late 19th / early 20th centuries who was called crazy for thinking like a woman. She was my first introduction to feminism and I was thrilled to meet her again when I was older and could appreciate what she was getting at.

My husband and I moved into our first house that we own last February. When we bought the house, I knew immediately that two things had to change: the kitchen and the wallpaper in the dining room. When we saw this wallpaper, my sister and I both immediately called to mind that narrator's description of the wallpaper in her confinement room:

I never saw a worse paper in my life.
One of those sprawling flamboyant patterns committing every artistic sin.
It is dull enough to confuse the eye in following, pronounced enough to constantly irritate and provoke study, and when you follow the lame uncertain curves for a little distance they suddenly commit suicide--plunge off at outrageous angles, destroy themselves in unheard of contradictions.
The color is repellent, almost revolting; a smouldering unclean yellow, strangely faded by the slow-turning sunlight.
It is a dull yet lurid orange in some places, a sickly sulphur tint in others.

It is that bad.

The kitchen is now finished, except for some paint. I've finally worked up my nerve and have attacked the wallpaper. I'd like to say it's a satisfying process, but this wallpaper is printed on gold foil, which makes removing the paper a real s.o.b. I've gotten half of the paper down now and it has cost me 10 precious hours of my precious life. This process is so bad that I find myself using my fingernails to pull the paper off in strips, like my narrator. I haven't done it yet, but by the end of the fight, I'll probably have gone to work on the walls with my teeth. I will win this battle. You're not gonna find me hanging out a window, telling my hubby to pick up the key under any damned banana tree.

Would Charlotte Perkins Gilman be impressed? I wonder.