The Yellow Wallpaper

"The Yellow Wallpaper" is a story of a woman's mental decline. Following the birth of her baby, the narrator falls into a depression. She feels her spirits could be lifted with more social contact, but her physician husband tells her that it is best if she "rested" in a more isolated atmosphere. She and her husband go to a house in the country and she is essentially confined to the house. She abhors the yellow wallpaper in the room she is in and becomes obsessed with it. She becomes delusional, imaging figures crossing about the yard and a woman trying to escape from behind the wallpaper's pattern.
I've always had an interest in both psychology and horror stories, so I liked this story quite a bit. As it is written in a journal-type fashion, the 1st person narration gave a clear view of the narrator's mental decline. The story is peppered with vivid descriptions of the narrator's delusions. I found the final scene of the woman crawling around the room, trying to get back into the wallpaper, quite disturbing. It was not only the imagery of the scene, but also the realization that the woman did not know that the marks she saw on the wall had been caused by herself, which I found disturbing. The writer's grasp of such psychological disturbances was, I feel, ahead of her time. At a period when the "rest cure" was the most offered remedy for mental disorders, the writer understood that this was more of a bane than a cure. Literature can have a profound effect on the mentality of a society and it is, in part, through writings such as this that our understanding of psychology has progressed to its current state.