Yellow Wallpaper

In the Yellow wallpaper the narrator begins her journal by admiring at the greatness of the house in which her and her husband vacation. She then goes into a in-depth description of her illness. She explains she is suffering from “nervous depression” and of her marriage. She complains that her husband, as well as doctor, John pays little attention to her and says her treatment requires little to no activity and especially forbids her from reading and writing. She obviously rebels against this as she does a good job of hiding her journal from him. Aside from irritably rambling on about her husband, the narrator often describes the room she is isolated in and particularly the yellow wallpaper. She is at first disturbed by the wallpaper with its “strange, formless pattern it is rebellious.” She later on however, begins to see it as not only ugly, but strangely provoking. The narrator notes that John is worried about her becoming too obsessive and fixed on it, and also that he refrains from repapering the just to prove he won’t give in to her anxious fears. More time passes, and as the narrator appears to be making no sort of progress in recovery, John impends to send her away to a real-care physician. The narrator is isolated nearly always she has grown to appreciate the wallpaper and that struggling to decipher its pattern has become her main entertainment. As her fixation increases, the patterns in the wallpaper become more and more distinct. It begins to look like a woman creeping behind the foremost pattern, which looks like the bars of a cage. Soon the wallpaper controls the narrator’s mind. She identifies with it so clearly now, and is determined to figure it out on her own. The yellow wallpaper’s pattern now visibly is a woman who is trying to escape from behind the main pattern. The narrator however, suspects that John is well aware of her obsession, and she decides to finally destroy the paper at night. By the end, the narrator is despairingly insane, persuaded that there are several creeping women around and that she is in fact the trapped woman resembled in the wallpaper and has escaped. When John finally breaks into the locked room he is shocked at the apparent situation and faints in the doorway.

The Yellow Wallpaper is written in such a descending way that it actually made me feel as though I could identify with her spiral into insanity. It was very feminist and seemed to recommend that woman at this age were very oppressed and ignored by those in authority, or just men in general. As the narrator and her husband were clearly having marital problems, John decided to treat her as a doctor, and not husband. The story poses an argument that if roles are reversed or distorted, disaster occurs. I would agree with this, as the narrator was treated medically for marital problems, isolated alone, driven to insanity taking comfort in wallpaper, and eventually (as the text suggests) kills herself. When roles are treated wrong, whether it be the overpowering of man over women in the wrong situations disaster may occur, and things won’t function properly as they were meant to be.