After the birth of her daughter, she suffered from postpartum depression. Like most all women of her time, Perkins Gilman married and had a child. These people helped her value both writing and the feminist movement and later influenced her short stories and essays. One of which was an early suffragist and the other was the author of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Harriet Beecher Stowe. She steps over him as she leaves.Ĭharlotte Perkins Gilman lived with her aunts. Her descent into madness continues and her husband enters the room and faints when he sees the state of the room and his wife. She convinces herself that she was once trapped in the wallpaper. She tries to peel off all the wallpaper to free the woman. She compares herself to this woman, as she feels trapped in the house by her husband. She sees an image of a woman behind bars and cannot think of anything else. The wallpaper scares her at first, and then she begins imagining patterns and pictures within it.

She becomes fixated on the yellow wallpaper in the room she is staying in and is clearly descending into madness. She continues to write secretly, and describes the house and room she is staying in.

He has told her not to write, though she loves to write. The woman is suffering from postpartum hysteria and secretly wonders if her husband is why she is not getting better. “The Yellow Wallpaper” is written in journal entries by a woman who is on vacation with her husband to a big house after giving birth to their daughter.

In the yellow wallpaper