The Yellow Wallpaper is an 1892 short story written by Charlotte Perkins Gilman. The book follows our narrator as she moves to the countryside as part of a rest cure for her post partum depression, prescribed by John, a respected physician and her husband. During her rest and the duration of the story, our main character is constantly belittled, infantilized, isolated, and gaslit by her husband until she experiences severe psychosis and eventually a complete mental breakdown.
Gilman uses the story to speak about the oppression and control over women prevalent during the 19th century, especially with the expectations of patriarchal subservience and motherhood. Many of the motifs of the story are found within their bedroom, a former nursery and children's room, which is the source of much of our narrators distress. She is forced to sleep and spend much of her time resting within the room by her husband as he believes it to be the best for her recovery despite her repeated protest and availability of alternative rooms. The bedroom also contains the titular yellow wallpaper, the complex, ugly patterns twisting into complex mazes and prison bars as the narrator's mental state declines. She convinces herself that she sees a woman trapped behind the pattern who escapes and creeps through the gardens during the day, much like the narrator herself who manages to take short walks through the garden while her husband is away at work, seemingly the only freedom granted to her. The gardens are constantly visible through the large windows of her bedroom, though the windows remain barred. The garden's represent much of the freedom that the narrator seeks, constantly describing how beautiful they are and how limited her access to them is due to the rest prescribed by John, watching strangers walk through the arbors and pathways and the countryside beyond.
Gilman's choice of meticulously maintained gardens rather than lush forests, fields, or other beautiful natural features that could surround a countryside mansion reveals that the freedom that her character becomes insane seeking is still limited as it only exists within the greater manufactured patriarchal structure. The only characters ever specified to be seen within the garden are women, John's sister Jennie, the woman from the wallpaper, and the narrator herself. John is often away from the home but is never mentioned to be within or passing through the garden, instead existing within a wider world outside of the limited scope that the narrator is permitted to experience by him. It is only the women of the story that are confined to the gardens, and the narrator's perception beyond are limited a single mention of trees and country meadows. This choice suggests that to the narrator (and by extension the other women of the story) that even her perception of freedom is still greatly limited by the systems of the patriarchy she finds herself in and is unaware of life as someone truly independent and equal as no precedent exists for her to see, instead only seeing the limits of what her culture and husband allow.
