The Yellow Wall-Paper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman
Published 1995 · 91,300 words · about 7 hours at an average pace
How hard is The Yellow Wall-Paper to read?
The Yellow Wall-Paper scores 60 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it quite demanding. The score is a weighted composite of nine measures: four of how hard the prose is to parse, five of how hard the meaning is to extract.
- Vocabulary: 42 out of 100
- Plain domestic vocabulary throughout.
- Sentence structure: 42 out of 100
- Short, fragmentary journal entries that break down as the narrator does.
- Abstraction: 45 out of 100
- Concrete on the surface, entirely about a mental state underneath.
- Information density: 42 out of 100
- Light; one room, one wallpaper, a few weeks.
- Narrative indirection: 85 out of 100
- A narrator whose grip on events loosens page by page, so almost nothing can be read straight.
- Symbolic density: 85 out of 100
- The wallpaper, the bars, the creeping woman and the bedstead all carry more than they say.
- Ironic distance: 78 out of 100
- The husband's kindness and the narrator's gratitude both mean their opposite.
- Resolution withholding: 55 out of 100
- The ending is a collapse rather than an explanation.
- Structural complexity: 35 out of 100
- A short linear journal.
How The Yellow Wall-Paper is regarded
The Yellow Wall-Paper holds a literary regard score of 83 out of 100, weighing its place in the canon, its critical reception, its influence on other writers, and the standing of its author. Regard is measured separately from difficulty: a demanding book is not necessarily an admired one.