Perhaps the most harrowing account of woman's symbolic confinement is narrated in the novella, "The Yellow Wallpaper," a story (partly autobiographical) about the psychological deterioration of a middle-class wife/mother. The metaphor of entrapment is presented in the heroine's obsession with the bedroom wallpaper which gradually becomes entangled with her reality. To Gilman, the stultifying atmosphere of the Victorian home leads to the destruction of family life. In place of genuine care and affection, the spontaneous expression of interconnection gives way to robot-like exchange between persons living under the same roof.
Gilman's relentless critique of the home, a view that Americans idolized an unhealthy arrangement based upon the fastidious division and separation of social roles, appears in all her works.
