In an article published in 1913, "Why I Wrote the Yellow Wallpaper?", Charlotte Perkins Gilman writes, "for many years I suffered from a severe and continuous nervous breakdown tending to melancholia". In about the third year, she sought out the help of a nationally renown specialist in nervous diseases, whose advice amounted to not much more than limiting "intellectual activity" and not working. This, in turn, drove Gilman much closer to the point of madness until spawning, in 1892, her story "The Yellow Wallpaper". Gilman's article eradicates any doubt as to what the real issue behind her story is. Her literature, as well as her contemporaries', centers around the oppressive domesticity that constituted the role of women in the late 19th century.

In the turn of the century, literature was flooded with advice on how to be a "proper woman" in middle class society. However, within the endless arrays of articles and columns, there existed writers such as Charlotte Perkins Gilman and Kate Chopin. Their work, as well as that of many others, often touched on themes such as imprisonment, escape, and freedom. In fact, the climax in Chopin's "The Story of an Hour" is when, a while after hearing of her husband's death, the main character has a revelation of sorts and the words that come out of her mouth are nothing more than, "free, free, free!". In "The Yellow Wallpaper", as well, the women the protagonist sees hidden in the walls seem to represent the entirety of womankind rattling their cages, trying to get out. In the end, one could even say that the protagonist loses her own sanity in her quest to do exactly the same thing.

This caging, so to speak, of women in their homes was less despite the increasing social and economic shifts taking place- what with urbanization, industrialization, falling birth rates, etc.-, and more because of them. Men were working increasingly longer hours and, according to the experts of the time, the role of the home was growing more and more important. This, of course, meant that the woman had to put in every effort possible into maintaining the safe haven unpolluted. That is not to say that Gilman, or any other woman, blamed or hated their husbands, families or homes; in fact, in "The Story of an Hour", Chopin specifically says that, despite the joy at being freed, the main character is still mourning he whose face never looked "save with love upon her". Her elation, indeed, does not come from the absence of the man but of that which he represents. After all, it is not their husbands who are oppressing them, but, as usual with large issues such as these, society itself. 

Another topic that "The Yellow Wallpaper" touches on is, of course, that of mental illness. It is the more obvious of its themes and also what critics seemed to have reacted to upon its initial release.  Gilman writes about its reception in "Why I Wrote the Yellow Wallpaper?". She writes, "When the story first came out in the New England Magazine about 1891, a Boston physician made protest in The Transcript. Such a story ought not to be written, he said; it was enough to drive anyone mad to read it.". To this, Gilman replies that "[it] was not intended to drive people crazy, but to save people from being driven crazy, and it worked". 

Granted, in her article the author uses the world people instead of women, yet, while doubtless some men afflicted with neurasthenia were subjected to what she was, it is hard to believe, especially in a non-contemporary albeit modern society, that doctors gave many men the order to not think or work. It borders on absurd. Treatment of men and women were hardly similar in so many fields and they were most probably even further apart in that of mental health. 

In "The Yellow Wallpaper", the protagonist is treated as a child, especially by her husband. He calls her "little girl" and "blessed little goose", he is condescending and the treatment she receives throughout the story is that of an infant. Seeing how the story is supposed to be a heavily fictionalized version of Gilman's own experiences, it wouldn't be too far of a reach to suppose that she realized that she was not taken seriously in her daily life or by professionals, when concerning her mental health. In "Why I Wrote the Yellow Wallpaper?" Gilman mentions that a woman she knew was saved from the same "remedy" she'd been prescribed after her family read "The Yellow Wallpaper". It is therefore clear that such occurrences were not entirely uncommon. 

Susan S. Lanser interprets Gilman's story, in her "Feminist Criticism", as a two dimensional uprising against patriarchy. The first dimension is that of the story's main character, who she sees as a representation of woman under patriarchal oppression. The protagonist, then, shatters her oppressors by tearing the wallpaper, somewhat losing her mind, and causing her husband, the one who had worked the hardest at keeping her tame, to faint. 

The second dimension is that of Gilman herself. Lanser brings up several instances of men fighting against "The Yellow Wallpaper" being spread; "I could not forgive myself if I made others as miserable as I have made myself!" the editor of the Atlantic Monthly said. William Dean Howells, who reprinted Gilman's story in 1920, called it "terrible", "too wholly dire", and "too terribly good to be printed". She then points out that "[feminists] could argue convincingly that Gilman's contemporaries, schooled on the "terrible" and "wholly dire" tales of Poe, were surely balking at something more particular: the "graphic" representation of "raving lunacy" in a middle-class mother and wife that revealed the rage of the woman on a pedestal". 

It would seem that that is the only difference between the horror these particular authors inspire, one does so by way of driving male characters insane, and the other does so by driving her female characters insane. Truthfully, when looked at objectively, Poe's stories should be classified as much darker seeing as how they, more often than not, involve deaths and corpses. However, as Lanser points out, men seemed to be more terrified by a view of a woman free from the expectations the society of the time had for her, the least of which was having an active imagination. 

All in all, despite the fact that for the first fifty years after its publishing "The Yellow Wallpaper" remained buried or praised merely as a piece of significance because of its psychological aspects, it has been reinterpreted by the feminist movement which saw in a much deeper message that resonated with its own cause. Even though Charlotte Perkins Gilman herself claimed to have written the story as a way to condemn medical practices such as the one that nearly caused her to lose her mind, her history and the language she utilizes suggests that the second meaning wasn't far behind on her agenda. After all, it was she herself who said that she did not regard her writing as art but as a sort of lecture with further significance and purpose in educating whoever comes upon it. 

