4/5 Stars: ‘The Yellow Wall-Paper’ is a New Adult, Gothic Short Story by Charlotte Perkins Gilman; ‘The Yellow Wall-Paper’ explores the role of women in America around the 1900s; expanding upon issues such as the lack of a life outside of the home and the oppressive forces of the patriarchal society. In particular, Gilman portrays the narrator’s insanity – her diagnosis of ‘Neurasthenia’, otherwise known as ‘Post-Partum Depression’ today – as a way to protest the professional and societal oppression against women. Whilst under the impression is that husbands and male doctors act with the woman’s best interest in mind; despite depicting them as mentally weak and fragile. Women’s Rights advocates of the era believed that the ‘outbreak’ of mental instability was the manifestation of their setbacks regarding the roles they were allowed to play in a male-dominated society. Therefore, women were even discouraged from writing, because it would ultimately create an identity and become a form of defiance. 'The Yellow Wall-Paper’ is interpreted by Feminist critics as a condemnation of the male control of the 19th-century medical profession.