Yellow Wallpaper

The Yellow Wallpaper

            Back in the 1800’s people didn’t know very much about medicine and diseases. This is what the narrator for, “The Yellow Wallpaper” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman experiences after she has her baby. Her husband John and her brother our both physicians and believe that she has “a temporary nervous depression-a slight hysterical tendency” (Gilman 1). She is not getting well fast enough, and John believes that the cure to her illness is complete rest. In order for her to get that rest he takes her to a secluded mansion for 3 months. At this mansion John treats her as if she was a child. Throughout the story the narrator slowly starts noticing weird things about the room, mainly the wallpaper in the room. Johns techniques in his medical practice drive the narrator to see people in the wallpaper and eventually go insane.

            When they arrive at the mansion, John makes the narrator stay in the stay in the nursery on the top floor of the house. This is the beginning of the babying John does to the narrator. She wanted a room downstairs, but John says that “there was only one window” in that room and she need as much air as she could get (2). When the narrator gets to the room, she notices that “the windows are barred” (3). Having bars on the window gives the illusion of being in jail and makes you feel like you are locked out from the outside world. She then notices the wallpaper and describes it as:

It is dull enough to confuse the eye in following, pronounced enough to constantly irritate and provoke study, and when you follow the lame uncertain curves for a little distance they suddenly commit suicide – plunge off at outrageous angles, destroy themselves in unheard of contradictions. (3)

This shows that she believes this wallpaper is hideous and is truly bothered by how it was made. The environment she was set up in was setting her up for failure. She was in a room that resembled a jail cell with wallpaper she couldn’t stand to look at.

            Even though she is forced to stay in this room she tries to find the good in it. She realizes that with all the windows she gets a great view of everything from the garden to the bay. Even with all of these beautiful views, there is one thing that she can’t stop thinking about, “that horrid paper” (4). At this point she is beginning to get an obsession with the wallpaper. She begins to study the patterns of it and believes that the paper is looking at her “as if it knew what a vicious influence it had” (5).  She continues to study and obsesses over it more. She even begins to see “bulbous eyes” starring at her from the wall paper (5). To further express her obsession, continually throughout the story she will be talking about something completely unrelated and will say things such as, “but I don’t mind it a bit-only the wallpaper” (5). She continually brings up the subject of the wallpaper even when what she is talking about has nothing to do with it.

            As she lives in the room longer and studies the paper more she continues to be able to bare the room and even like it. She hides the things that she sees in the wallpaper and believes that “nobody knows them but [her], or ever will” (8). She is constantly keeping watch making sure no one sees her looking at the wallpaper. She begins to see a pattern that “gets clearer everyday” until she finally makes it out to be “a women stooping down and creeping about behind the pattern” (8). I believe that this shows that everyday, she begins to get a little crazier and starts to see more and more things in this wallpaper. Finally, she gets totally insane and starts seeing actual people in the paper. She begins to notice that as the light changes so do the pattern of the wallpaper. At night she says, “it becomes bars” and she can see the women in the paper the best at night (10). As the weeks go by she gets tired more easily and sleeps more. John thinks it’s a good thing, but isn’t she supposed to be getting stronger?  All the analyzing of the wallpaper is draining her energy and making her weaker. Still obsessing over it, she sees John and his sister Jennie looking at the paper and begins to worry that they are trying to see the patterns that she sees.

They are only staying there for another week and she starts to worry because she has not yet figured out the pattern. She begins to stay up through the night because it is more “interesting to watch developments” at night (11). Though analyzing it at night so much she begins to realize that “the front pattern does move” and it is because “the woman behind shakes it” (12). This shows that since she has been staring at the paper night after night, in just the moonlight, her mind had begun to play tricks on her. She began to see what she wanted to see. It was as if the woman was trying to break out of the wallpaper by shaking it.  After she sees the women trying to get she believes that during the day she does get out because “[she] has seen her!” (12). On the last night she was going to be there, once she saw the women in the paper she ran over there and tried to help her get out. She tried and tried until “[they] had pulled all the wall paper off” (13). Her she believed that the woman from the inside was actually helping her pull off the wallpaper but in reality it was just her ripping it down herself.

            She was going crazy; she locked herself in her room and through the key out the window just so she could be alone with the wallpaper. Now that she is alone, she wanted to “astonish [John]” (14). In order to do that she tries to commit suicide by hanging herself. She finds a rope, but doesn’t have anything high enough to stand on. The bed is bolted down and she tries everything to move. She even “bit off a little piece of the corner off” and the only reason she stopped was because “it hurt [her] teeth” (14). What kind of sane person would try to bite through metal? When she first moved in to the room, the only thing she liked about it was that there were a lot of windows to look through. Now that she has gone insane, she doesn’t “like to look out of the windows” anymore because she is now seeing women outside creeping (14). What once was the only positive thing she could say about the room is now the one thing she can’t stand to do. Also, the one thing that she couldn’t stand to look at is now the only thing she cares about. John then tries to come into the room but it is locked. He finds the key and opens the door to his wife creeping on the floor. John faints, and she continues to creep right over his body.

            When the narrator first moved into the room she hated it. She thought the wallpaper was disgusting and couldn’t stand to look at it. Once she got obsessed with it she began seeing things in. I believe that she began seeing herself in the wallpaper because at night she said that it looked like there were bars on the wall, just like how the windows in her room were barred. The women she saw was her, because during the day the narrator would go out and walk in the garden sometimes. She wasn’t completely confined to the room. Just, as the narrator saw the women in the wallpaper walking around during the day. This was all caused by John’s techniques for treating the symptoms that she had. To detain someone in what seems to be a prison cell for 3 months would cause most people to go insane. She had nothing to do, so she began to imagine things to entertain herself. In her case, she imagined someone in the wallpaper with the same problem that she had. Since she was stuck in the room for so long she took it to far and began trying to break free of the room and the way she did that was by tearing the wallpaper down and creeping around. This problem would have never happened if they knew the medical stuff we know now. Then they would have realized that she just had postpartum depression.