The Gothic novel is a type of fiction which was inaugurated by Horace Walpole's The Castle of Otranto: A Gothic Story (1764). Following Walpole's example, authors of such novles set their stories in the medieval period, often in a spooky castle furnished with dungeons, underground tunnels,and evoke horror via mystery and a variety of terror.
Later the term "gothic" has been extended to a type of fiction which does not set in the medieval period but is saturated with a gloomy and terrified atmosphere. The extended sense of the term "Gothic" can be applied to Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights, her sister Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre and so forth. Charlotte Perkins Gilman's macabre fantasy--"The Yellow Wallpaper"--also exploits the nightmarish feel, violence, and uncanny terror frequently found in Gothic writings.
Some feminist critics use the term "female Gothic" to discuss some particular stories in which the heroine expresses what otherwise cannot be spoken under the law of patriarchy. The genre of the "female Gothic" allows women writers otherwise subject to the narrative restrictions of gentility to find outlets for their repressed sides or the unconscious.
Therefore, in the story "The Yellow Wallpaper," can you find any "Gothic" elements? What are they (the setting, the room, the narrator, the psychological status of the heroine)? Why does Gilman use this "Gothic" genre to express her dark protests, fantasies, and fear?
