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 …showed first 75 words of 784 total…

…showed last 75 words of 784 total…behaviors in so many ways? As a female reading "The Yellow Wallpaper" in 2003, I have an overwhelming desire to free the narrator from her husband and the male-dominated society that surrounds her. To feel alive, the woman needs stimulation and connection with people; instead, she feels isolated and her ideas are oppressed, which ultimately leads to her insanity. Gilman does an excellent job of illustrating the position that women held in society during the nineteenth.