A ghost story is a tale that involves the supernatural. "The Yellow Wallpaper" is not a ghost story. It deals with what drives a human being to madness in the real world and can best be described as a Gothic tale.

In "The Yellow Wallpaper," the narrator is a woman suffering from depression after the birth of her child. Instead of allowing her to participate in devising her treatment, her husband, a doctor, decides for her that she must have total rest and relaxation. This involves no reading or mental stimulation and no contact with her infant son. The treatment is based on an actual treatment used at the time, developed by a doctor named Weir Mitchell.

The treatment does not help the woman. Instead, it drives her into insanity. She becomes obsessed with the pattern of the yellow wallpaper in her room and believes she sees a figure crawling around underneath it. However, this figure is not a supernatural creature but a figment of the narrator's imagination brought on by sensory deprivation.

The story is not meant to examine the existence of ghosts or the supernatural. Instead, it is completely rooted in the natural world and is meant to condemn misguided and cruel psychological treatments aimed at women in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries by patriarchal society.

Is "The Yellow Wallpaper" based on a true story?

Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s short story “The Yellow Wallpaper” draws from experiences that Gilman herself faced, but it is fiction rather than an entirely true story.

After having a baby, Gilman suffered from what today would probably be called postpartum depression. Her doctor prescribed her something called a “rest cure,” essentially the same treatment the woman in the short story endures. Like the narrator, Gilman was forced to live an extremely sedate life during this time and was not allowed to do anything for herself. More so, as with the woman in the story, Gilman was told not to write.

For more evidence that the story is semi-autobiographical, you can look into Gilman’s reasons for writing the story. Gilman stated that she wrote it to communicate with her doctor, S. Weir Mitchell—the doctor who prescribed the “rest cure.” Specifically, the story was written as a way to alert Mitchell about the harm caused by his supposed cure.

Of course, Gilman was not the only woman to be misdiagnosed and mistreated. Throughout history, women’s mental health has constantly been wrongfully interpreted due to gender bias and discrimination. In this sense, Gilman’s short story isn’t just about her experiences; it’s about the experiences of countless women whose mental health difficulties were not treated fairly.