Adaptation https://doi.org/10.1093/adaptation/apaf026 © The Author(s) 2025. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. For commercial re-use, please contact reprints@oup.com for reprints and translation rights for reprints. All other permissions can be obtained through our RightsLink service via the Permissions link on the article page on our site—for further information please contact journals.permissions@oup.com. The voice of the woman in the wall: uncanny narration as domestic critique in the Suspense radio adaptation of ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’ (1948) Josie Torres Barth Bucknell University, Lewisburg, PA 17873, United States * Corresponding author: E-mail: josie.barth@bucknell.edu Abstract This article argues for the significance of radio drama to studies of adaptation and gender through analysis of the Suspense radio play ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’ (CBS, 1948). Far from the ‘lost’ story of legend, the radio play aired to a large audience with the imprimatur of a major network, its corporate sponsor, and broadcasting’s highest honours, providing an instructive case of what scholars of adaptation may miss should they fail to account for popular broadcast media. Through forms of narration and vocal performance that transgress established gendered categories, the play adapts the 1892 Charlotte Perkins Gilman story to a new medium and cultural context, demonstrating uncanny echoes between the ‘separate spheres’ ideology of the nineteenth cen- tury and the valorization of home and family life newly resurgent in the postwar years. Translating the story to audio adds to its existing narrative ambiguity and extends its critique to the medium of radio itself, by dramatizing for female listeners the difficulties of treading increasingly unstable boundaries between the private sphere of domestic life and the public sphere of work, com- merce, and entertainment. The multiple senses of the term uncanny—the un-home-like within the heart of the home and the confusion between the animate and inanimate in which the boundary between life and death is blurred—demonstrate a larger state of liminality for postwar broadcast audiences. Through this example, I aim to demonstrate the possibilities of a method of close- reading broadcast media texts, influenced by both historical context and theories of narration and address. Keywords: radio drama; narration; gender; genre; vocal performance; broadcast media. ‘I made up my mind secretly to start writing again in spite of them’, a female voice confides. ‘But I don’t dare let John know […] he hates for me to write a word. But writing is such a relief to my mind. I can write down things, tell things here that…no, John says I’m not to brood about those things […] so I’ll only write about the house’. This opening narration of a 1948 radio play, likely recognizable as an adaptation of the Charlotte Perkins Gilman story ‘The Yellow Wall-Paper’, may be unexpected in light of an axiom that the story was ‘lost’ in the years between its 1892 publication and Page 1 of 21