"The Yellow Wallpaper" (1892) by Charlotte Perkins Gilman is a seminal feminist short story told through journal entries. The narrator, suffering from postpartum depression, is confined by her physician husband John to an upstairs nursery in a rented colonial mansion. Prescribed the "rest cure," she is forbidden from writing or working. Isolated and mentally deteriorating, she becomes fixated on the room's yellow wallpaper, gradually perceiving a woman trapped behind its pattern. As her obsession deepens, the boundary between reality and delusion collapses. The story powerfully critiques nineteenth-century medical treatment of women and their social oppression, ending with a chilling psychological breakdown.
