"The Yellow Wallpaper" by Charlotte Perkins Gilman is a feminist short story that tells the story of a woman diagnosed with "nervous depression" and confined to her room. While there, the wallpaper becomes her obsession. It's a haunting tale of Victorian views of women's mental health and male dominance in medicine.

First published in The New England Magazine in January 1892. It follows the story of a nameless narrator diagnosed with “temporary nervous depression” and “a slight hysterical tendency” whose husband, an esteemed physician who does not believe she is sick, confines her to a room in a remote country house for recuperation from a melancholia, which we would now understand as post-partum depression. She becomes obsessed with the wallpaper in her bedroom.

It is a powerful, surreal and haunting tale of male domination and early attitudes toward the themes of mental illness, the oppression of women, and the struggle for self-expression. Some may argue this is a Gothic fiction with its aesthetic of fear and haunting. However, I also see it as precursor to the post-war surrealist movement. In which the narrator’s unconscious mind expresses itself in a depiction of illogical and dreamlike scenes and ideas to frame the contradictory conditions of dream and reality into an absolute reality, a super-reality, or surreality – as the narrator’s mind descends into madness.

A PDF of the text is readily available online, but if you would like a physical copy the lovely people at my local bookshop in Crosby will help Pritchards Bookshop (I do not earn a commission on this link).