"The Yellow Wallpaper"

In her short story "The Yellow Wallpaper," Charlotte Perkins Gilman symbolically portrays women's treatment and confinement by men in the nineteenth century. Gilman wrote the account more than one hundred years ago, driven directly by her own personal experiences of having to face the male-dominated society she lived in.
The female narrator in "The Yellow Wallpaper" is suffering from a "temporary nervous condition," which is essentially depression. Right in the beginning, she states, "John [her husband] is a physician, and perhaps - (I would not say it to a living soul, of course, but th…