Written in 1892, "The Yellow Wallpaper" by Charlotte Perkins Gilman tells the story of a woman expected to act meek, docile, and willing to follow her husband's every wish. The narrator of the story appears as the ideal wife, on the outside, but on the inside, she is really an individual just yearning to make herself free. The narrator's changing view of the wallpaper symbolizes her mental state and her deterioration.
Surrounded by male dominance, the narrator is married to John, a very practical physician. John loves his wife very much, yet seems to control her a lot. When the narrator believes she is sick, her husband does not believe her. He thinks she has a "temporary condition." However, because he loves her so much, he rents a very large house for the summer so she can rest and recuperate. At first the narrator likes the house. She loves the garden, and it even has greenhouses. But she cannot stand her bedroom. She wanted a downstairs bedroom "that opened on the piazza and had roses all over the windows, and such pretty old-fashioned chintz hangings." Instead her room has bars on the windows, a bed nailed to the floor, and putrid yellow wallpaper, wallpaper that eventually aids in her demise.
The yellow wallpaper begins to shift the narrator's focus from herself to itself. When the narrator first moves into the bedroom, she expresses disappointment, especially about the wallpaper. She "never saw a worse paper in [her] life. One of those sprawling flamboyant patterns committing every artistic sin." At first, the narrator seems to focus a lot on the "lame uncertain curves" and other intricate details of the paper. But then, as time goes by, she becomes obsessed with everything about the paper. She partly blames John for this. He encourages her to not think about her "nervous condition" by telling her that "the very worst thing [she] can do is to think about [her] condition.