Turn-of-the-century feminist writer Charlotte Perkins Gilman sends a subversive message through her beautifully artistic, disturbing short story "The Yellow Wall-Paper." By using the example of one woman's struggle -and ultimate failure- to survive her prescribed treatment for a supposed case of hysteria, Gilman demonstrates how it is nothing other than restrictive Victorian-age gender roles based on the notion of female inferiority that oppresses the middle- and upper-class women of her time.
The story's main character is the narrator, whose physician husband, John, has diagnosed her with mild hysteria and believes that she can only become well again with much bed rest and quiet during a summer-long stay at a rented colonial mansion on a lovely but isolated landscape. Gilman immediately casts suspicion on the infallibility of the husband's profession when toward the beginning of the story the narrator concedes that her husband's being a doctor is, perhaps, "one reason I do not get well faster." The reader may also at once wonder about the narrator's happiness with her marriage as she makes a reference to a fantasy about reaching "the height of romantic felicity" at her temporary home but then reasons that "that would asking too much of fate!" Further suggesting her resigned, pessimistic view of connubial life, the physician's wife mentions that he often laughs at her for her differing thoughts but that "one expects that in marriage.".
Although she, herself, makes it clear in the beginning of the story that she secretly believes "congenial work, with excitement and change," would do her good, her doctor-husband forbids her from working or even writing her thoughts down (an activity from which she derives great mental relief). She admits that writing does exhaust her quite a bit but explains that it is because she is "having to be so sly about it, or else meet with heavy opposition.
