[1] It is regarded as an important early work of American feminist literature for its illustration of the attitudes towards mental and physical health of women in the 19th century.

As a form of treatment, the husband forbids the journal writer from working or writing, and encourages her to eat well and get plenty of air so that she can recuperate from what he calls a "temporary nervous depression – a slight hysterical tendency", a common diagnosis in women at the time.

[2][3][4] As the reader continues through the journal entries, they experience the writer's gradual descent into madness with nothing better to do than observe the peeling yellow wallpaper in her room.

The story makes striking use of an unreliable narrator in order to gradually reveal the degree to which her husband has "imprisoned" her due to her physical and mental condition.

He faints, but she continues to circle the room, creeping over his inert body each time she passes it, believing herself to have become the woman trapped behind the yellow wallpaper.

Women’s rights advocates of the era believed that the "outbreak" of this mental instability was the manifestation of their setbacks regarding the roles they were allowed to play in a male-dominated society.

[5] After the birth of her first daughter, Gilman suffered postnatal depression and was treated by Dr. Silas Weir Mitchell, the leading expert on women's mental health at the time.

He suggested a strict 'rest cure' regimen involving much of bed rest and a blanket ban on working, including reading, writing, and painting.

Aware of how close she had come to a complete mental breakdown, the author wrote ”The Yellow Wallpaper” with additions and exaggerations to illustrate her criticism of the medical field.

(Gilman was ultimately proven right in her disdain for the "rest cure" when she sought a second opinion from Mary Putnam Jacobi, one of the first female doctors and a strong opponent of this theory, who prescribed a regimen of physical and mental activity that proved a much more successful treatment.

Mitchell continued his methods, and as late as 1908 – 16 years after "The Yellow Wallpaper" was published – was interested in creating entire hospitals devoted to the "rest cure" so that his treatments would be more widely accessible.

"The Yellow Wallpaper" was one of many stories that lost authority in the literary world because of an ideology that determined the works' content to be disturbing or offensive.

Lanser argues that the short story was a "particularly congenial medium for such a re-vision ... because the narrator herself engages in a form of feminist interpretation when she tries to read the paper on her wall".

"[11] Martha J. Cutter points out that many of Charlotte Perkins Gilman's works address a "struggle in which a male-dominated medical establishment attempts to silence women".

"[14] The narrator in "The Yellow Wallpaper" is not allowed to participate in her treatment or diagnosis and is completely forced to succumb to everything in which her doctor and in this particular story, her husband, says.

[17] Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz wrote that "the story was a cri de coeur against Gilman's first husband, artist Charles Walter Stetson and the traditional marriage he had demanded.

[19] Horowitz consults the sources of Charlotte's private life, including her daily journals, drafts of poems and essays, and intimate letters, and compares them to the diary accounts of her first husband.

She shows how specific poetry, fiction, and popular science shaped her consciousness and understanding of sex and gender, health and illness, emotion and intellect.

Horowitz makes a case that "The Yellow Wall-Paper", in its original form, did not represent a literal protest against Mitchell (a neurologist who treated Gilman in 1887) and his treatment.

Having created The Forerunner in November 1909, Gilman made it clear she wished the press to be more insightful and not rely upon exaggerated stories and flashy headlines.

While Treichler accepts the legitimacy of strictly feminist claims, she writes that a closer look at the text suggests that the wallpaper could be interpreted as women's language and discourse.

A look at the text shows that as the relationship between the narrator and the wallpaper grows stronger, so too does her language in her journal as she begins to increasingly write of her frustration and desperation.