In 1892, Charlotte Perkins Gilman's The Yellow Wallpaper appeared in The New England Magazine. The story drew on Gilman's own experience of medical treatment that restricted women's intellectual and creative life. Its strange domestic horror exposed the violence hidden inside respectable marriage, medicine, and interior decoration.

Although prose, the work strongly influenced feminist literary culture and later confessional and domestic poetry. Its trapped female speaker helped poets imagine rooms, walls, bodies, and madness as symbols of patriarchal confinement and suppressed creativity.