The Purple Wallpaper

We dig you, Charlotte Perkins Gilman. Our wallpaper is purple. It sticks to our clothes, clings to our fingers. It's very purpleness seeps about us like a fog. It too has its own smell, the smell of purple. We stare at this purple wallpaper, trying to figure out the mysterious pattern, trying to free the championshipless prisoner trapped behind it. We sometimes find ourselves creeping about it, rubbing our shoulders against it, lost to obsession and insanity and partly knowing it.

Your wallpaper story is better than ours. Your story has got those feminist themes (the controlled wife, the suppression of the female creative impulse) and the exploration of the inability of the society and doctors of your time to grasp the meaning of depression. Heavy stuff. You're story is also a haunted and terrifying story. And that's where you might like our story. Our purple wallpaper story is also haunted. Terrifying, sometimes.

Now we go into the room with the purple wallpaper. We'll try to come out in a few months (but of course the smell of purple has gotten into our clothes, the stain of the wallpaper is in our skin--even when we leave the room it will follow us). But now is the time to fixate our gazes on that purple wallpaper. We're locked in. The windows are barred and we've thrown the key out into the garden. You best not bust the door down; you might not like what you see.

Go Vikings!