The Yellow Wallpaper

by Charlotte Perkins Gilman

"The Yellow Wallpaper" is full of Gothic elements and conventions. For example, the narrator first describes the house she and her husband are renting as "[a] colonial mansion, a hereditary estate, I would say a haunted house." Of course, there is the narrator's "woman in the wallpaper." Why would Gilman build a Gothic story around the narrator? Write an essay that develops the significance of the Gothic to the development of the narrator's character.