The Yellow Wallpaper

Charlotte Perkins Gilman wrote "The Yellow Wallpaper." The woman in the story believed she was sick. I think she believed she was a different type of sick than she actually was; she had post-partum depression. This disorder was not discovered during this time period and she said that her husband did not believe she was sick. Her husbands' name is John and she like many other woman in other stories we've read goes unnamed. I found it interesting how comfortable the woman was with her husband basically being in charge of her life. It shows the time period and that the role of man and woman has changed drastically.

The woman doesn't like the room she stays in constantly. She is never "allowed" to see the outside world, she just has to look at things outside through the window. Her focus is primarily to the digusting yellow wallpaper in this room. She describes it as old, smoldering, unclean, dull, and sulphur tinted. The woman makes comparisons with this wallpaper and sounds down-right crazy and delusional. She says the wallpaper has a "spot where the pattern lolls like a broken neck and two bulbous eyes stare at you upside down." She says the eyes crawl all over the wall, up and down and sideways. WEIRD!!!

The woman speaks of the wallpaper so vividly that it almost comes alive. I think if she was allowed to see places other than the yellow wallpaper, it wouldn't bother her so much. She has spent too much time looking just at the wallpaper and now it sort of hunts her. The wallpaper becomes part of her life, it is an obsession. Because of this she creates another life, another personality, and has crazy dreams. At the end she creeps around her husband and tells him that him nor Jane (split personality) could keep her in the room. She tore down the wallpaper so she could not be put back. If the woman had post-partum depression it only worsened due to the yellow wallpaper.