The Yellow Wallpaper

Being left alone in a room while being banned from any activity whatsoever is not a treatment. It's solitary confinement. The lack of hyperbole here is frightening. Knowing what we know today in Psychology this sort of "treatment" is guaranteed to cause damage to the brain and as a result the Psyche. If you were to take any human being, disordered or not, and put them through what the narrator was, as were thousands of women, the deprivation from thought and deprivation from human contact is enough to cause hallucinations and delusions in just three days let alone several weeks. The magnitude of effects isolation has on the brain is nearly quadrupled for anyone with a pre existing diagnosis. Gilman's near autobiographical depiction of the matter is a reality that needed to be expressed for feminists and clinical psychologists alike. 

The method of expressing the symptoms is my favorite part of the work. Being in a first person journal form make the perspective to be experienced and not simply viewed as a third person perspective would've done. Something like this is similar to a frog boiling in a pot of water, in that psychological decay is slow and therefore hard to fully grasp until it's often too late to fix it. Which brings me to the ending, it feels very real to me. In order to hold the weight of knowledge it deserves, I think it has to end without resolution.