Please give the summary of "The Yellow Wallpaper" by Charlotte Perkins Gilman.

This excellent short story explores in the short story
form a woman's experience of post-natal depression and highlights many of the practices
that were actually adopted by doctors to "help" such patients, but only served to make
their depression worse. This story was based on the author's own experience of
depression, and as such it has a vitality and truth to it that gives it real
significance.

The story is based around a first person
narrative of a woman suffering depression after her child's birth. Supposedly for her
own good, her husband, who is presented as a loving and caring man, says she must stay
in bed in a room which is notable for its bizarre yellow wallpaper that the narrator,
having nothing else to do, spends a lot of time looking at, trying to trace and work out
the pattern. As the story progresses and the narrator descends ever further into
madness, she begins to think she can see a woman trapped behind the first layer of the
wallpaper and trying to get out. She is described as shaking the lines of the pattern as
if they were bars on a cage. Finally, the story reaches its climax when the narrator
tries to free this woman by ripping down the wallpaper, and begins to walk around the
edge of the room herself, as if she has so completely identified with the woman that she
is now trapped there too. Note how this represents her descent into lunacy, but also how
she identifies herself with her alter-ego that she has created: both women are
frustrated and trapped: intellectually, emotionally, psychologically and
physically.