The Yellow Wallpaper

Our scent adaptation of Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s 1892 short story “The Yellow Wallpaper” was first conceived as a Halloween 2020 release, inspired by the confinement we were experiencing during that maddeningly uncertain time. Good taste prevailed, however, and we decided to shelve this series for another time.

That time has now come! This beguiling and ruthlessly economical snippet of horror fiction has been a formative reading experience for high school students for decades, even though the subject matter is decidedly adult.

For new readers staring down non-fictional legislative attempts to revive 19th century standards for pregnancy, motherhood, and mental healthcare, our heroine’s predicament seems all too current… and her escape (as it were) oddly cathartic.

  • A Recurrent Spot Perfume Oil

    There is a recurrent spot where the pattern lolls like a broken neck and two bulbous eyes stare at you upside-down.

     

    I get positively angry with the impertinence of it and the everlastingness. Up and down and sideways they crawl, and those absurd, unblinking eyes are everywhere. There is one place where two breadths didn’t match, and the eyes go all up and down the line, one a little higher than the other.


    Indolic jasmine glaring through a haze of tobacco yellow and stained lace.

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  • A Yellow Smell Hair Gloss

    But there is something else about that paper—the smell! I noticed it the moment we came into the room, but with so much air and sun it was not bad. Now we have had a week of fog and rain, and whether the windows are open or not, the smell is here.

     

    It creeps all over the house.

     

    I find it hovering in the dining-room, skulking in the parlor, hiding in the hall, lying in wait for me on the stairs.

     

    It gets into my hair.

     

    Even when I go to ride, if I turn my head suddenly and surprise it—there is that smell!

     

    Such a peculiar odor, too! I have spent hours in trying to analyze it, to find what it smelled like.

    It is not bad—at first, and very gentle, but quite the subtlest, most enduring odor I ever met.

     

    In this damp weather it is awful. I wake up in the night and find it hanging over me.

     

    It used to disturb me at first. I thought seriously of burning the house—to reach the smell.

    But now I am used to it. The only thing I can think of that it is like is the color of the paper! A yellow smell.

    Scorched wood and oversteeped chamomile petals pressed wetly into beeswax, brittle fossilized amber, a whisper of honeyed hay and saffron, and the sweet decay of overripe butter figs.

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  • Air and Sunshine Galore Home & Linen Spray

    It is a big, airy room, the whole floor nearly, with windows that look all ways, and air and sunshine galore. It was nursery first and then playground and gymnasium, I should judge; for the windows are barred for little children, and there are rings and things in the walls.

    Radiant emptiness: a breezy citrus-touched aldehyde with a hint of sunny amber and dusty heliotrope, and the metallic tang of sun-warmed iron bars.

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  • Committing Every Artistic Sin Perfume Oil

    It is stripped off—the paper—in great patches all around the head of my bed, about as far as I can reach, and in a great place on the other side of the room low down. 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 repellant, 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.

    No wonder the children hated it! I should hate it myself if I had to live in this room long.

    A smouldering, unclean scent: turmeric-dusted acrid marigold, linseed oil, bitter orange peel, crumbling plaster, clotted vanilla, and a whiff of sweet mildew.

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  • Creeping by Daylight Perfume Oil

    I think that woman gets out in the daytime!

     

    And I’ll tell you why—privately—I’ve seen her!

     

    I can see her out of every one of my windows!

     

    It is the same woman, I know, for she is always creeping, and most women do not creep by daylight.

     

    I see her on that long shaded lane, creeping up and down. I see her in those dark grape arbors, creeping all around the garden.

     

    I see her on that long road under the trees, creeping along, and when a carriage comes she hides under the blackberry vines.

    I don’t blame her a bit. It must be very humiliating to be caught creeping by daylight!
    Furtive, uncanny. Blackened blackberry bleeds onto bruised green leaves, crushed grass, and wet earth while tendrils of honeysuckle clutch and grasp at noontime shadows.

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  • I’ve got out at last Perfume Oil

    He stopped short by the door.

     

    “What is the matter?” he cried. “For God’s sake, what are you doing!”

     

    I kept on creeping just the same, but I looked at him over my shoulder.

     

    “I’ve got out at last,” said I, “in spite of you and Jane! And I’ve pulled off most of the paper, so you can’t put me back!”

     

    Now why should that man have fainted? But he did, and right across my path by the wall, so that I had to creep over him every time!


    Torn paper revealing scorched plaster embedded with bitter citron, yellow grapefruit, and damp white cedar.

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  • Interminable Grotesques Perfume Oil

    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.

     

    The whole thing goes horizontally, too, at least it seems so, and I exhaust myself in trying to distinguish the order of its going in that direction.

     

    They have used a horizontal breadth for a frieze, and that adds wonderfully to the confusion.

     

    There is one end of the room where it is almost intact, and there, when the cross-lights fade and the low sun shines directly upon it, I can almost fancy radiation after all,—the interminable grotesques seem to form around a common centre and rush off in headlong plunges of equal distraction.


    Flowers in full chase, radiant and absurd, grotesquely endless: narcissus blooms lolling on broken stems, their buttery perfume swelling into a debased crescendo of honeyed heliotrope, toxic lily of the valley, almond blossom, and opium poppy.

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  • The Woman Behind it Perfume Oil

    By moonlight—the moon shines in all night when there is a moon—I wouldn’t know it was the same paper.

     

    At night in any kind of light, in twilight, candlelight, lamplight, and worst of all by moonlight, it becomes bars! The outside pattern I mean, and the woman behind it is as plain as can be.

     

    I didn’t realize for a long time what the thing was that showed behind,—that dim sub-pattern,—but now I am quite sure it is a woman.


    A perfume of veils and bars, moonlight slashing through prison walls: silvered lavender and white iris shuddering like lamplight on stained plaster, ambergris frothing through vanilla husk, and the phantom outline of a rose-touched woman’s silhouette.

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