The Rest Cure: a strictly enforced regime of six to eight weeks of bed rest and isolation, without any creative or intellectual activity or stimulation.
A woman suffering from "temporary nervous depression" is kept in a country estate for a summer of recovery, as diagnosed and prescribed by her husband, a well-respected physician. Over the course of this treatment, however, we see her mind fracture from lack of stimulation and expression until it is only her troubling obsession with the "horrid wallpaper" that gives way to relief in the form of a secret journal.
Described by Alan Ryan as "one of the finest, and strongest, tales of horror ever written. It may be a ghost story. Worse yet, it may not," this is a story not of a woman who goes mad over the ugliness of the wallpaper in her room but instead a woman who is finally empowered to break through the confines of an oppressive marriage by any means possible.
