I don’t like to look out of the windows even – there are so many of those creeping women, and they creep so fast.

Elaine R. Hedges, in the preface, introduces The Yellow Wallpaper as “a small literary masterpiece” , and indeed we can agree that it’s exactly what it is, “a small literary masterpiece”. Indeed, written at the end of the 19th century, it sounds surprisingly modern. With its polyphony, the complexity of its enunciation, with multiple narrative voices, it concentrates a series of elements in a centripetal move that forces a density of the writing of the subject, that happens here to be the female subject. Dis-location of the subject – in both senses of the term – questions the notion of stable identity. An intuition of fragmentation and an acute consciousness of gender at once create the text and are created by it. Even the title of the short story hides its own ambiguity, publishers having hesitated between writing the title with a hyphen or not: wallpaper or wall-paper.
Surprisingly, this short story is not well-known in France.
It is an “I” narration. The narrator remains anonymous.

Dans le cadre de ce récit à la « 1ère personne », l’entité qui réunit la fonction narrative et celle de personnage demeure anonyme.

From poetry to short story:
Literary genres

Categories are not completely separate. The narrative and the poetic modes are at work in most texts. Here is what Aragon, the famous French poet, has to say in an interview:

Je vous répète que je ne fais pas de distinction entre les poètes et les romanciers. Très souvent, les poètes m’ont donné moins de satisfaction que certains romanciers. Il y a brusquement dans un roman, en pleine réalité quotidienne, une phrase, une page, comme une ouverture sur ce qui est au-delà de lui, sur ce que nous appelons de façon abrégée poésie .

Aragon does not mean to deny literary genre categories. Rather, he sees no reason to establish a hierarchy between poetry and novels, for he can see that some form of poetry can appear in any text – what he describes as “an opening onto something beyond itself”.