What is the most important element of fiction in "The Yellow Wallpaper"?Charlotte Perkins Gilman

First published in 1892, "The Yellow Wallpaper" brought
different reactions from what has come from modern commentators who have perceived
Charlotte Perkins Gilman's story as a feminist indictment of the subjugation of women,
praising its thematic depth.  While early reviewers of the story noted the skillful use
of Gothic elements that Gilman used, perceiving "The Yellow Wallpaper" as a horror
story, still both early and modern critics agree that Gilman creates the most compelling
characterization.

The unnamed narrator presents a woman who
suffers from the repression of male Victorian cultural attitudes about women, entering
into a harrowing journey into madness.  Gilman's skill at describing the woman's
frustration with the unsymmetrical pattern of the wallpaper in the room where she is
confined, and then her hallucinations of seeing a woman behind this hideously yellow
paper, a woman she feels compelled to free take the reader through the convoluted path
of the narrator's tortured mind.  Indeed, through her character, Gilman demonstrates the
psychological horror that such a treatment as that of Dr. Weir Mitchell's program of
rest and separation could produce.

Charlotte Perkins
Gilman's characterization of her unnamed narrator is both significant and innovative as
one of the earliest modernist portrayals of the unaware narrator with an intense focus
on what she thinks and feels.  The narrator struggles with this self-expression as it
runs against the conventional Victorian wisdom that both her husband and sister-in-law
embrace; at times she blames herself:  "I am a comparative burden already!"  Certainly,
Gilman's character remains a striking model of the repressed and tortured woman who
seeks desperately for self-expression but is unsure of her
direction.