The Yellow Wallpaper
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- R$ 0,90
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- R$ 0,90
Descrição da editora
Life has taken a sudden interior turn but the literature of the lockdown may have already been written. A century ago writers throughout the supposedly civilised world realised their once familiar, domestic world had changed profoundly and began to describe it in singular unsettling ways. The best word for what they found and how they described it is the German one ‘unheimlich’ whereby the familiar or homely is suddenly strange; a unique word for which we have in English the unsatisfactory ‘uncanny’.
In his essay of 1919, Freud used the word ‘unheimlich’ to describe the disquieting, unsettling short fiction of his time. As has been noted by the critic Mark Fisher and others however, he structured his inquiry into the unheimlich on the stories themselves, unable to create a theory which superseded them. These stories have endured, better perhaps than his theories. We have collected together the best of them — the funny, the horrific and the simply disturbing — to offer insight and commentary on the strange world we have been.
The real purpose of our confinement may be as hidden as we are. In this story, the American writer Charlotte Perkins Gilman describes a woman’s growing obsession with the interior decor of a rented house, with heart breaking precision.
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Yuen leads listeners convincingly through this beautifully wrought 1892 short story. She begins the first-person narrative with the voice of a sensible if somewhat distraught young woman confined by her doctor husband to an attic room with hideous yellow wallpaper and bars on the windows. She is thought to have a nervous condition and is permitted no activity, including writing, lest it tire her. Eschewing melodrama, Yuen gradually changes tone and inflection as the weeks pass and the wife starts tearing down the wallpaper, perceives another woman behind it trying to get out, and finally descends into madness. It's a short, intoxicating listen that merits more than one replay.
