Haunted Houses By Charlotte Perkins Gilman - 1705 Words

The tales of haunted houses is a long held genre in American Gothic literature. The haunted houses are usually described as South plantations homes. When the houses were in their prime, they were the best of the best. They represented the upper echelons of society, where only the super rich could own. The dark secret behind such plantation houses is that they were usually build and maintained by slavery. As time pasted and the Emancipation Proclamation was passed at the end of the American Civil War, slavery ended and the plantation homes fell into ruin. In Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s 1892, short story, â€Å"The Yellow Wallpaper,† while the story does not take place in a typical haunted plantation house, it does take place in a vacation home†¦show more content†¦At the time, to own or stay at a haunted house is considered to be the height of fashion. There is something romantic about a haunted house as that means something forbidden went on in the house before a great tragedy. However, the colonial house they have been able to lease, while not haunted, is â€Å"queer;† or why else would they have been able to lease the house so cheaply. When they first arrive at the colonial house the narrator is happy about the house. It it the most beautiful house as it â€Å"stand[s] well back from the road, quite three miles from the village† and it makes her â€Å"think of English places that you read about, for there are hedges and walls and gates that lock, and lots of separate little housed for the hardeners and people† (88). She arrives at the house and deems it to be just like the haunted houses society reads about at the time. The house is in some legal troubles over who rightly owns the house, which is why they were able to get the house so cheap. While the narrator wanted to take a room downstairs with a view of the gardens, her husband places her in a room upstairs. She describes the room upstairs as â€Å"a big, airy room, the whole floor nearly, with windows that look all ways, and