Imprisonment of Women Exposed in the Yellow Wallpaper When asked why she chose to write "The Yellow Wallpaper," Charlotte Perkins Gilman said that experiences in her life that relate deal with a nervous Her condition, then called "melancholy", had prompted her to write the story as a means of trying to save other people from a similar fate. Although he may have suffered from a condition similar to that of the narrator of his illuminating tale, Gilman's story cannot be coined simply as a tale of madness. Madness is the vehicle for Gilman's larger commentary on the atrocities of social conformity. The protagonist of "The Yellow Wallpaper" comes to recognize the inhumanity in society's treatment of women and, in her awakening, visualizes her torment in the faded yellow wallpaper hanging in her rooms, her prison. The story's unnamed narrator is purposely left nameless; the narrator could be any wife, any mother, any woman. Gilman transforms the hysterical and mad woman of early nineteenth-century literature into a genius. The first surprising image that presents itself to readers of "The Yellow Wallpaper" is not that of a room, it is not of the house, but of the character John, the husband. John is described as a man of “practical and extreme” nature (246). His presence throughout the tale provides the narrator's motive. John refuses to accept his wife's terms; she doesn't believe there's anything really wrong with her. If a high-ranking doctor, and one's husband, assures friends and relatives that in reality there is nothing wrong other than a temporary nervous depression, a slight hysterical tendency - what is one to do? (246)The narrator is possessed by her husband...... in the center of the sheet......ion. Sven Birkerts. Boston, Massachusetts: Allyn and Bacon, 1992. 387-400.Haney-Peritz, Janice. "Monumental Feminism and the Ancestral Home of Literature: Another Look at the 'Yellow Wallpaper'." Women's Studies 12 (1986): 113-128. Johnson, Greg. "Gilman's Gothic Allegory: Anger and Redemption in 'The Yellow Wallpaper'". Studies in Short Fiction 26 (Fall 1989): 521-530. King, Jeanette and Pam Morris. "On Not Reading Between the Lines: Patterns of Reading in 'The Yellow Wallpaper'." Studies in Short Fiction 26.1 (Winter 1989): 23-32.Knight, Denise D. "The Reincarnation of Jane: 'Through This' - Gilman's Companion to 'The Yellow Wallpaper.'" Women's Studies 20 (1992): 287-302 . Rigney, Barbara Hill. Madness and sexual politics in the feminist novel: studies on Bronte, Woolf, Lessing and Atwood. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1978.