Charlotte Perkins Gilman

Charlotte Perkins Gilman was a very interesting woman who lived ahead of her time. She held to strong feminist ideals in an era of male dominance. Her biography calls her one of the "ancestral mothers of the modern feminist movement." She had much to say about women's rights as well as many other political issues. It seems she was a very intelligent woman with much passion for her causes. This may have been one reason she suffered from periods of mental anguish throughout her life. For, while she had the support of many, I imagine she met with much opposition which could have led to her unrest and depression.

In her story "The Yellow Wallpaper" Gilman portrays a woman caught in the malaise of depression with nowhere to turn except further into her self. While her husband, John, thinks he is doing the right thing by isolating her and keeping her quiet, he is actually  exacerbating her condition. All she really wants to do is be free to express herself with her writing, but John has forbidden this, so she feels all the more trapped. With nothing else to do she turns her attentions to the ugly, yellow wallpaper. At first she simply sees it as a horrible decorating mistake, but after awhile she begins to see it as having a life of its own. Slowly she becomes more and more obsessed with the images she sees in the wallpaper. Instead of sleeping at night she starts examining the paper more and more thoroughly. Eventually she finds the figure of a woman trapped behind the swirling "bars" in the foreground. I believe this woman is a parallel not only to the main character in the story, but to Gilman herself. The woman in the wallpaper tries desperately to escape her confines just as the woman in the story wishes to escape her own bindings. In the end, the main character actually starts ripping the paper off the walls in an attempt to free the woman trapped inside and save her own sanity.

I agree with the description of this story as a horror story. This poor woman is trapped in the outer confines set up by her husband as well as the inner confines of her own psyche. The horror, in my opinion, comes not from a traditional antagonist, but from within the mind of the main character.