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In ‘The Yellow Wallpaper,’ written by prestigious feminist author Charlotte Perkins Gilman, after the birth of her baby, our nameless narrator suffers from postpartum depression and is forced by her dominant doctor’s husband, John, to weeks of bed rest. While in the confines of bed, the narrator starts a rapid descent into madness and becomes convinced that women are stalling and crashing. While the narrator begins a rapid descent into madness in the confines of bed rest, he becomes convinced that women are ‘stopping and creeping’ behind the miserable, patternless yellow wallpaper adorning her bedroom walls. Men around her, who have fulfilling, active, and lucrative jobs, undermine her disease and thoughts as a whole during her ascending madness. The yellow wallpaper becomes an obsession that eventually overcomes the narrator. In his work, author Sigmund Freud’s Question of Lay Analysis explores the concept of the unconscious. Freud argues that humanity is not fundamentally in control of themselves, but rather the people are guided by their desires, it is rather the unconscious that runs the show. Freud points to dreams as being a part of the unconscious psyche over which man

kind has no control, contending, [I]t happens to all of us nightly that our thoughts go their own way and create things that we do not understand, that appear strange to us, and that remind us in alarming ways of pathological products. For Freud, dreams are images, gathered from our waking life and then condensed and displaced in various ways in accordance with our desires. Freud’s concept of ‘it’ is filled with drives or impulses that haunt the unconscious, which can even cause perceptible damage. The ‘it’ or ID therefore operates by the principle of pleasure, while the ‘I’ or Ego operates by the principle of reality, and the two always appear to be in constant internal conflict. Besides exploring the ID, Ego, and Superego, Freud also discusses the effects of trauma, claiming,[I]f one has luckily survived a trauma, one pays attention to the approach of similar situations and signalizes the danger through an abbreviated reenactment of the impressions that one experiences with the trauma, by an affect of anxiety. After one has survived trauma, one often turns to repression, which is theholding at bay of a memory from re-entering consciousness and forcing a return to a trauma.