The Yellow Wallpaper

The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman is a semi-autobiographical short story which she wrote after a severe bout of post-partum depression. The story is written in the first person as a series of journal entries. The narrator is a woman confined to the upstairs bedroom of a summer house. Her husband, a physician, has diagnosed her as suffering of a "temporary nervous depression - a slight hysterical tendency;" a diagnosis common to women in that period. The story illustrates the effect of confinement on the narrator's mental health, and her descent into psychosis. With nothing to stimulate her, she becomes obsessed by the pattern and color of the room's wallpaper.