The Yellow Wallpaper

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The yellow wallpaper is about a, it's told from the first person. It's a woman named Jane. She spends three months in this room with like a bed and a bar and a gate that she can't go out of. And over time she becomes convinced that she sees a woman behind, you know, in the pattern of the wallpaper, like trying to get out. By the end of the book, she decides she's going to free this woman and she like tears all the wallpaper off the wall.

We double-dip a bit in this week's show, reading two short stories and proving that you don't have to have a ton of time to read something thought-provoking. The theme is "female authors writing about controversial-at-the-time ideas," and the stories are The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman and The Lottery by Shirley Jackson.

One is about a misdiagnosed "hysterical" woman slowly going insane through lack of mental stimulation, one is about a seemingly innocuous small town that is slavishly devoted to its own traditions. Both remain subversive and retain their impact even today.

Oh yeah and we also talk about which grocery store animal mascot would win in a fight.

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