"The Yellow Wallpaper" is written in epistolary narrative style, as a collection of first person journal entries written by a woman whose physician husband has confined her to the upstairs bedroom of a house that he has rented for the summer. She is forbidden from working, and has to hide her journal entries from him, so that she can recuperate from what he calls a "temporary nervous depression—a slight hysterical tendency," a diagnosis common to women in that period.[2] Her husband controls her access to the rest of the house. A key locks the door.