Charlotte Perkins Gilman's "The Yellow Wallpaper" is one of the most analyzed short works of the weird. When I put out a collection of early pulp ghost and atmospheric horror stories, I included this tale.
Historically, women were treated much differently than men when it came to mental health. Women could get confined to a psychiatric hospital for years under things like "overly emotional" or "hysteria". The latter was apparently caused by a dysfunction of the uterus.
If one looks at a timeline of word usage, words based on "hyster" peaked around the 1900's, so this story fit in well with the thinking of the psychoanalytic community. John, a doctor, feels his wife is suffering from hysteria and needs to be kept under a strict lack of stimulus. Because she is kept sedated mentally, her brain begins to fill in the missing pieces of living. She begins to enjoy looking and tracing the wallpaper with her eyes, and it becomes her favorite "because of the wallpaper".
Eventually the dark feelings she holds inside begin to manifest themselves. "There are things in that paper that nobody knows but me". Things begin to creep out and become clearer. My take on this is that she has another personality but it wasn't well documented at the time. In the end the alternate personality overpowers and becomes the poor victim.
Iron Noder 2017