The Yellow Wallpaper

The descriptive words in the Yellow Wallpaper brought the story to life. It was almost as if the house itself was a character. The narrator felt that it was haunted and queer, but then she also thought it to be beautiful.

The narrator's husband brought her to this house to help her with her condition. He believed she had some kind of anxiety. As the story progresses, it only seems to get worse with her feeling of the wallpaper in her room. She ccontinually asks if they can go to another room, but her husband refuses and tells her it will only make her condition worse.

The narrator's husband has every last word. I can tell that this story was written by a feminist just by how she depicts the patriarchal society. It is almost as if the husband in the story is what is truly making his wife mad. She is under strict control. She cannot visit family or even writ in a journal. Her insanity increases as she is couped up in the room with yellow wallpaper.

She goes completely insane when she notices a woman in the wallpaper trying to get out. She thinks that her husband and sister-in-law have noticed the peculiar behavior, and she sees them as a potential threat in getting in the way of her freeing the woman in the paper.

One day, when her husband is not home she tears down the wallpaper, and tells Jennie she did it because she disliked the paper. Jennie understands and does not take the incident as a peculiar one. She does not even tell John.

However, when the narrator is alone she locks herself in the room and begins to tear the wallpaper to pieces. The more she tears, the more involved in the paper she becomes. She even contemplates jumping out of the window, but she is scared of all the crouching woman that are scurrying around outside. She has gone completely insane now. She thinks tons of woman have come out of the paper, and by the time her husband opens the door she has lost her identity. She does not even recognize him. She believes she was the woman stuck behind the paper, and she tells him how she will never be stuck again. The end of the story is left with John fainting and the narrator creeping over him.

What a strange story. The author portrays the woman character as one that is wanting liberation from her marriage, or just from John. She is continually put down and degraded by her so called condition that is only made worse by her husbands demands of bed rest, no family, and no writing. She is trapped by him and it escalates to her feeling as if she is the woman behind the wallpaper. This story depicts a time period of patriarchal society, and a rise of women liberation. It has an eerie and scary tone to it. I still have not decided if the narrator has actually killed herself in the end or if it was truly just the wallpaper she tore to pieces.

I will be interested to hear all the interpretations in class. This was my first time reading this story, and I do not know exactly how to take it quite yet. I did like it though. I found it to be an interesting perspective and story all together. It was creative and imaginative, and I always love stories with great detail.