Charlotte Perkins Gilman was a prominent social critic and feminist writer in the United States of the period from the 1890s through the 1930s. In The Yellow Wallpaper, originally published in 1899, she presents the internal dialogue of a woman diagnosed with hysteria and for whom total rest has been prescribed. In the short fiction, the patient is slowly driven mad by her cure, cut off from any intellectual pursuits whatsoever.
Though The Yellow Wallpaper is a work of fiction, it was based on Gilman's own experience after being diagnosed as an hysteric and prescribed a "rest cure" which prohibited her writing and labelled her feminism and social critique as symptoms of uterine illness. Gilman recovered from her "cure," and went on to write influential social theses, including Women and Economics (1898), and a feminist utopian novel, Herland (1915), which has become a classic of American women's literature.
