Gender Containment: Oppression and Depression Charlotte Perkins Gilman wrote “Yellow Wallpaper” to express how women's rights are oppressed, how society deals with depression and how gender inequality was prevalent in the 19th century. This short story takes place in a time when women are not treated equally to men and women have few rights. The author uses “The Yellow Wallpaper” to drive this point home to the reader. Over time, women have experienced confinement due to gender, depression and oppression. Through each of these forms of confinement, Charlotte Perkins Gilman attempts to show how gender, depression, and oppression lead to the narrator's confinement in "The Yellow Wallpaper." In "The Yellow Wallpaper", CharlotteIn the article Controlling the Female Psyche: Assigned Gender Roles in "The Yellow Wallpaper", English professor Elizabeth Carey notes that John, the narrator's husband, is a respected doctor and a "rational thinker" and that the narrator is "a devoted wife who does not question her husband's authority." The narrator easily falls into her role by trying to do everything her husband tells her to do. Their marriage is a typical 19th century marriage where roles are established based on their gender. Despite the narrator's objections, she agrees to undergo treatment for depression because her husband wants her to receive treatment. The narrator is represented as submissive to her husband. When he tells her to do something, she obeys him without question. During this period, men are considered the dominant sex. They are the main providers of the family while women are considered meek and weak. When the wife says “he takes care of me, and so I feel ungrateful for not valuing him more” (Gilman 793), she feels guilty for not listening to her husband. He provides for the family and she feels she must do whatever it takes to make him happy. She finds that men generally control the actions of women. Charlotte Perkins Gilman uses detailed descriptions to describe the room in which the narrator is confined, saying: "I lie here on this big still bed – it is nailed down, I believe – and I follow this pattern from hour to hour" (Gilman 796). . This is an example of its confinement both physical and symbolic. The narrator feels physically confined in the house, which leads to a feeling of isolation. The nursery is set up so that it feels more isolated from the real world "for the windows are barred for little children, and there are rings and objects in the walls" (Gilman 793). The narrator gradually descends into madness. With the confinement of her environment, the woman is gradually subjected to male oppression which is symbolic of the norm of the time. By confining his wife to the nursery, John allows his domination over his wife to prevail. The narrator then becomes obsessed with the yellow wallpaper because she feels out of control. She visualizes the pattern of the yellow wallpaper looking like a trapped woman, just as the narrator feels trapped by the people in her life who are trying to control her. As author Beverly A. Hume says in her book Gilman's "Managing Madness in The Yellow Wall-Paper," "Charlotte Perkins Gilman's narrator evokes sympathy - not sympathy".