The Physician Husband — The Yellow Wallpaper

A woman and her physician husband take a cheap ancestral hall for the summer. She would call the colonial mansion haunted. He laughs, as one expects in marriage. John is practical in the extreme. He has no patience with faith, hates superstition, and scoffs at anything that cannot be felt, seen, and put down in figures. He is also a physician of high standing. On dead paper she writes what she would not say to a living soul: perhaps that is why she does not get well faster. He does not believe she is sick.

Friends and relatives hear the same verdict from John and from her brother, another physician of high standing: temporary nervous depression, a slight hysterical tendency. She takes phosphates or phosphites, tonics, journeys, air, and exercise, and is absolutely forbidden to work until she is well again. Personally she disagrees. She believes congenial work, excitement, and change would do her good. She has already written in spite of them. Being sly about it exhausts her, and open opposition is worse.

She sometimes fancies that less opposition and more society would help. John says the very worst thing she can do is think about her condition. She confesses that thinking of it always makes her feel bad. So she lets that thought alone and turns, at last, to the house.