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50 free The Yellow Wallpaper trivia questions with answers — literature quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
Charlotte Perkins Gilman wrote The Yellow Wallpaper in two days in 1890, after a doctor had ordered her to live as domestic a life as possible and never touch pen, brush or pencil again. The story she produced — a woman's secret journal from a barred upstairs room, where the paper on the walls begins to move — was turned down by one famous editor as too miserable to print, then largely forgotten for most of a century. These fifty questions follow the text closely: John's diagnosis and prescriptions, the house and the room, the pattern by day and by night, the sister-in-law and the visitors, and the creeping figure behind the paper. They then widen out to the real rest cure and the neurologist who devised it, Gilman's marriages, daughter, self-published periodical and other books, the story's rejection and revival, and its radio, stage, opera and film adaptations. It suits anyone who has read the story for a class or a book group, students revising the American short story, and trivia players who like a round built on a single text. Every answer carries an explanation and a source, so the page works as a study guide as well as a quiz.
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Q 01What does John do on entering the room to find Gilman's narrator creeping round the stripped walls?
He faints
He faints right across her path by the wall, so she has to creep over him each time she circles the room; 'Now why should that man have fainted?' she wonders.
Q 02Which name joins John's in the narrator's last cry in The Yellow Wallpaper, 'in spite of you and…'?
Jane
Jane appears nowhere else in the text, which leaves readers to decide whether the narrator is naming herself, the dutiful wife she has escaped along with John.
Q 03Which light, 'worst of all', turns the outside pattern of the paper into bars for Gilman's narrator?
Moonlight
Moonlight, which 'shines in all night when there is a moon', makes the paper seem a different thing entirely; by daylight the woman behind it is 'subdued, quiet'.
Q 04What about the paper, besides its look, does Gilman's narrator analyse for hours, then call 'yellow'?
Its smell
Its smell — 'a yellow smell' — hangs about the house whether the windows are open or not, and she thinks 'seriously of burning the house' to reach it.
Q 05What does John, 'a physician of high standing', assure relatives is all that ails Gilman's narrator?
Temporary nervous depression
Temporary nervous depression 'with a slight hysterical tendency' is the verdict; his prescription is tonics, journeys, air and exercise, and an absolute ban on 'work'.
Q 06How long is the summer lease for which John will not 'renovate the house' in The Yellow Wallpaper?
Three months
Three months is the lease, John says, so the paper stays — and after it, he warns, she would want the heavy bedstead changed, then the windows, 'and so on'.
Q 07What does Gilman's narrator believe about the 'great immovable bed' in her upstairs room?
It is nailed down
It is nailed down, she believes — and by the end that bedstead, with its canvas mattress, is all that remains in the stripped room once the furniture is carried out.
Q 08Which novelist was an aunt of Gilman's absent father Frederic Perkins, and a support to the family?
Harriet Beecher Stowe
Harriet Beecher Stowe, author of Uncle Tom's Cabin, and her suffragist sister Isabella Hooker both shaped young Charlotte's view of the world after Frederic left.
Q 09Which novelist, also given the rest cure, mocked it in a 1925 novel as 'rest in bed; rest in solitude'?
Virginia Woolf
Virginia Woolf had the same treatment Gilman endured, and her 1925 novel has a society doctor 'invoke proportion' before ordering silence and rest.
Q 10What did Gilman say The Yellow Wallpaper was intended to do, adding 'and it worked'?
Save people from being driven crazy
Save people from being driven crazy, she said; she had defied her own doctor's orders and gone back to work, then wrote the tale 'with additions and exaggerations' to indict the medical field.
Q 11What is the name of John's sister, the housekeeper who complains the paper stains everyone's clothes?
Jennie
Jennie, 'a perfect, and enthusiastic housekeeper', finds yellow marks on everyone's clothes and is once caught with her hand on the paper — the narrator takes her for a rival.
Q 12How does Gilman's narrator describe the summer house — haunted would be 'asking too much of fate'?
A colonial mansion
A colonial mansion, 'a hereditary estate', she writes, standing quite alone well back from the road, with greenhouses 'all broken now' and hedges, walls and gates that lock.
Q 13Which holiday is 'over' when Gilman's narrator says mother and Nellie and the children stayed a week?
The Fourth of July
Q 21Whose 1989 version, written by Maggie Wadey and directed by John Clive, starred Julia Watson?
The BBC
The BBC film, with Stephen Dillane as the husband, was later shown in the United States on Masterpiece Theatre, decades before a 2011 American version went straight to video.
Q 22Which horror author's 1927 essay on supernatural fiction said The Yellow Wallpaper 'rises to a classic level'?
H. P. Lovecraft
H. P. Lovecraft praised how subtly it traces 'the madness which crawls over a woman dwelling in the hideously papered room where a madwoman was once confined'.
Q 23Where does Gilman's narrator say she threw the key after locking herself in, 'under a plantain leaf'?
Onto the front path
The Fourth of July visit was John's idea of 'a little company' to do her good; it leaves her exhausted, and his sister takes over the housekeeping from then on.
Q 14Who, 'also a physician, and also of high standing', says the same as John about Gilman's narrator?
Her brother
Her brother is a physician too, so the two men who rule on her health are both family; a friend who was once in Mitchell's hands says he 'is just like John and my brother, only more so'.
Q 15What does Gilman's narrator see in the pattern as 'an interminable string… budding and sprouting'?
Toadstools
Toadstools 'in joints' is her image, the outer pattern being 'a florid arabesque, reminding one of a fungus' that sprouts new shoots and new shades of yellow.
Q 16John's 'hysterical' verdict on Gilman's narrator takes its name from the Greek word for which organ?
The uterus
The uterus is 'hystera' in Greek, and the ancient idea of a 'wandering womb' causing disease survived in the diagnosis doctors handed to women for centuries.
Q 17What was Gilman's only child named, born in March 1885, just before the breakdown behind the tale?
Katharine
Katharine, born on March 23, 1885, lived until 1979; after the separation Gilman sent her east to her father, who she said 'had a right to some of' the girl's society.
Q 18Which Gilman utopia ran as a serial in 1915 but did not appear as a book until 1979?
Herland
Herland's women bear children by parthenogenesis and have no surnames at all — 'Why should we?' one asks; 'we are all descended from a common source'.
Q 19Which 1898 Gilman treatise, put into seven languages, argued motherhood should not preclude paid work?
Women and Economics
Women and Economics made Gilman internationally famous; it borrowed from Thorstein Veblen the idea that women are objects of exchange between men, and admirers ranked it with John Stuart Mill's The Subjection of Women.
Q 20In which Californian city did Gilman write the tale on June 6 and 7, 1890, and later die in 1935?
Pasadena
Pasadena is where Gilman fled with her daughter in 1888 after separating from her husband, and where she returned in 1934 to be near that daughter for her final year.
Onto the front path it goes, and she tells John so 'in the gentlest voice', then again 'several times, very gently and slowly', until he goes down to fetch it.
Q 24What did Gilman's narrator want in the downstairs room John refused, the one opening on the piazza?
Roses all over the window
Roses all over the window and 'pretty old-fashioned chintz hangings' were her wish, but John said there was only one window, no room for two beds and no near room for him.
Q 25Where was The Yellow Wallpaper first printed, in January 1892, a year and a half after Gilman wrote it?
The New England Magazine
The New England Magazine ran it as 'The Yellow Wall-paper'; the tale had been written in two days in June 1890 and rejected by a rival editor that same summer.
Q 26Which periodical's editor Horace Scudder turned the tale down in 1890 for making him 'miserable'?
The Atlantic Monthly
The Atlantic Monthly had a new editor: Scudder was only a couple of months into the job when the manuscript arrived on August 28, 1890, and he turned it down quickly.
Q 27Which novelist passed Gilman's manuscript to editor Horace Scudder on August 28, 1890?
William Dean Howells
William Dean Howells, 'the Dean of American Letters', had once edited the same periodical himself, which is why the tale reached Scudder's desk on August 28, 1890.
Q 28What did Gilman write and edit single-handedly from 1909 to 1916, reaching nearly 1,500 subscribers?
The Forerunner
The Forerunner carried much of her fiction as serials, including What Diantha Did and The Crux, and has been called 'perhaps the greatest literary accomplishment of her long career'.
Q 29Whose 1973 reissue, with an afterword by Elaine Hedges, made the tale a staple of women's studies courses?
The Feminist Press
The Feminist Press, founded in 1970 to rescue 'lost' works by women, put the tale on women's studies syllabuses nationwide; the Norton Anthology of American Literature admitted it in 1990.
Q 30Which term was coined by Silas Weir Mitchell, the neurologist John threatens to send Gilman's narrator to?
Phantom limb
Phantom limb was Mitchell's coinage from Civil War nerve-injury wards; the man behind the rest cure is also remembered as the father of medical neurology.