The narrator and her husband John rent a house for the summer. The narrator is suffering from nervous depression. Her husband, who is a doctor, forbids her from writing and confines her to a room in the house to rest. The narrator becomes obsessed with the pattern on the yellow wallpaper in her room. She starts believing that there is a woman trapped within the wallpaper. By the end, the narrator strips the wallpaper off the walls, declaring that she has freed the woman, revealing that she has descended into madness.