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150 multiple-choice questions and 45 flashcards, written to the AP English Literature blueprint. Every question carries a full rationale.
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AP English Literature, Common Core ELA 9-12 reading literature, IB English A: Literature
CoStudy's The Yellow Wallpaper (Gilman) bank holds 195 items. Every multiple-choice question carries a written rationale explaining why the correct answer is correct and why each distractor is tempting but wrong.
A sample of 12 multiple-choice questions from the bank, with the full rationale shown.
A common objection from earlier readers was that the story was:
Answer: D — Too disturbing or 'unhealthy' to publish for nervous readers
A/C/D) Wrong. D) Correct — early objections actually feared the story would harm readers like the narrator.
The story's stance on women's intellectual work is:
Answer: D — That it is necessary + therapeutic, + that denying it harms
A/C/D) Wrong. D) Correct — Gilman's whole life argues this point.
Disability studies readings of the story tend to:
Answer: D — Take the narrator's mental experience seriously as itself meaningful, not only as metaphor
A/C/D) Wrong. D) Correct — the mind in crisis is itself an object of careful reading.
The narrator describes her own response to John's care as:
Answer: D — Pretending to be cheerful + hiding her writing
A/C/D) Wrong. D) Correct — concealment + performance are the only outlets she retains.
The physician whose actual rest cure Gilman underwent + named was:
Answer: C — S. Weir Mitchell
A/B/D) Wrong. C) Correct — Mitchell is named or alluded to in the text.
A common misreading of the narrator's final state is that:
Answer: B — She is now 'truly free' in a triumphant sense — wrong; Gilman insists on the cost as well
A/C/D) Wrong. B) Correct — the doubled reading is the story's discipline.
The narrator prefers a different room — one downstairs — but John insists on:
Answer: D — The upstairs former nursery
A/C/D) Wrong. D) Correct — his refusal to take her preference seriously sets the pattern of dismissal.
John threatens to send her to which doctor if she does not improve:
Answer: C — S. Weir Mitchell
A/B/D) Wrong. C) Correct — the threat in the text names the real physician whose cure Gilman herself underwent.
A critical reading attentive to race + class in Gilman's later writings will:
Answer: D — Hold the story's feminist achievement together with the eugenicist + nativist tendencies in her later thought
A/C/D) Wrong. D) Correct — modern criticism refuses to choose either celebration or dismissal alone.
A psychoanalytic reading often frames the narrator's experience as:
Answer: D — Return of the repressed female self under the surface of patriarchal denial
A/C/D) Reductive. D) Correct — the layered pattern is read as conscious + unconscious.
The bed is nailed to the floor, which signifies:
Answer: A — Immobilized rest + restraint masquerading as fixture
B/C/D) Wrong. A) Correct — the immovability of the cure is literalized in furniture.
A common off-by-one student error places the key-throwing scene:
Answer: C — Only at the climax — wrong; she throws the key earlier the same evening she begins peeling
A/B/D) Wrong. C) Correct — the key-throw happens before John arrives, not after he faints.
6 sample cards from the 45 in the bank.
Theme: domesticity as confinement.
The nursery is a prison. The bars on the windows + nailed bed turn the home into the institution it pretends to oppose. Gilman insists the home is a structure.
The narrator's relationship to her own perceptions?
She doubts them constantly because John dismisses them. The dismissal itself helps drive her decline.
Who is Mary?
The baby's caretaker. The narrator is not allowed to care for her own child during the rest cure.
What does the creeping symbolize?
Women's coerced posture — moving only when not seen, behind the formal pattern of social life. Mass creeping outside the window in the final scenes universalizes the image.
Theme: imagination repressed becomes pathological.
Gilman believed work + intellectual life were therapy. Their prohibition turns the narrator's creative perception into haunting + obsession.
Theme: gaslighting before the term existed.
John laughs at her, calls her 'little goose,' carries her to bed. The pattern of intimate dismissal is what the story diagnoses + names.
These samples are a small slice. The full bank runs flashcards, multiple choice and timed mock exams with per-chapter progress tracking, on the web and in the iOS app.
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The The Yellow Wallpaper (Gilman) bank holds 195 items: 150 multiple-choice questions, 45 flashcards. 18 of them are on this page to read free, with no signup.
Yes. Every multiple-choice item carries a written rationale that states the controlling principle behind the correct answer and then addresses each wrong option in turn — why it tempts and precisely where it fails. Knowing why the plausible answer was wrong is worth more than knowing which letter was right.
The samples on this page are free to read in full, rationales included, with no account. The complete 195-item bank, the timed mock exams and per-chapter progress tracking are part of CoStudy on the web and in the iOS app.
Last reviewed 2026-08-22. Banks are written against the certifying body's published exam outline and re-checked when that outline changes — exams get renumbered, retired and reweighted, and a bank written to a superseded outline teaches the wrong proportions. Figures that are re-indexed annually are deliberately not asserted as rules; the questions test the governing principle instead.