‘mark p o’connor

Based on Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s delicately brutal 1892 novella, The Yellow Wallpaper (1982) is a delicately evocative horror story of the first order, rooted in the reality of post-partum depression and added burden of its pernicious denial. Young wife and mother Jane is trapped on every front. Her husband John and brother James –both physicians–are quick to ascribe her pervasive unhappiness to hysteria, a catchall term designed to blame a multitude of woes and malaises to the mercurial vagaries of women’s wombs.