The Yellow Wallpaper

"The Yellow Wallpaper", written by Charlotte Perkins Gilman in 1890, details the descent of a young woman into madness.

Her supportive, though misunderstanding, physician husband, John, believes it is in her best interests to go on a "rest cure" after the birth of their child. The family spends the summer at a colonial mansion that has, in the narrator's words, "something queer about it" and her depression/anxiety, (commonly diagnosed today as postpartum depression), spirals out of control as she fixates on the yellow wallpaper in their bedroom.

Gilman wrote this story in an effort to illustrate how a woman's lack of autonomy can be detrimental to her mental, emotional, and even physical wellbeing.