A Psychoanalytic Approach to “The Yellow Wallpaper” The short story “The Yellow Wallpaper” first appeared in the January 1882 publication of The New England Magazine, a monthly literary magazine published in Boston. Authored by Charlotte Perkins Gilman this short story was not well received at printing and was not reprinted until twenty-eight years later in William Dean Howell’s collection,The Great American Short Stories in 1920. As part of the collection it gained some popularity for a time and then just died out again. Unfortunately this was the extent of the life of her work while she was still alive. However in 1973 the story was reissued by the Feminist Press with an exceptional commentary by Elaine Hedges and finally became popularly rediscovered. Elaine Hedges explained the work as a “pioneering masterpiece of feminist literature” (Pompele 61). Since the publication, theorists using a Feminist approach most overwhelmingly study the story.Gilman’s emphasis on the importance of language and text, and the fact that “The Yellow Wallpaper” is a tale of mental breakdown, make Lacanian psychoanalytic a natural way to consider the work in order to help readers understand the author’s use of language as a manifestation not of herself but the “other” as a means to safely express herself. As an autobiographical story there exist very undeniable connections between Gilman’s personal life and that of the narrator. A study of “The Yellow Wallpaper” is quite remiss if not offering some of the parallels between the author and the narrator as note of interest. In his dissertation, Pompele approaches the work as an “asylum trauma narrative in which the author gives witness to the personal horror of her own captivity in psychiatric spaces and the forced treatment she had to endure there” (60). At 24, Gilman became terribly weak and depressed. She quickly turned