The Yellow Wallpaper

"The Yellow Wallpaper" by Charlotte Perkins Gilman is by far my favorite short-story we have read for homework yet. This storie explored the effects of postpartum depression and how insane a woman is capable of becoming, because of her raging hormones and the effect of confinement. This story, therefore, displays two key concepts: the effect of postpartum on a mother and the effect of confinement on any individual.

It is ironic that the woman's husband, John, confides her in the nursery upstairs in their summer home for "recovery" because it is in fact having recently given birth to a baby that has sparked the flame in her insanity. This story reminds me of something Stephen King could have come up with. It is creepy, yet intriguing, and makes the reader want to keep reading further. The confinement is what leads to the narrator's obsession with the wallpaper.

Since the window is barred and the stairs gated, she has only the wallpaper to stare at and imagine all sorts of things. The pattern and color of the wallpaper is fascinating to the narrator. Eventually she imagines figures that are later recognized as woman, creeping behind the patterns in the wallpaper. As the story progresses she feels that she was one of them and tears at the wallpaper gradually to prevent anyone from pulling her back into the wallpaper. Others see the tearing of the wallpaper as normal because of its awful smell and color. It astounds me that anyone that comes across the narrator in these acts dismisses them as having any harmful effect.

The fear of getting pulled back into the wallpaper drives the woman to want to jump out the window, yet she is scared of the women outside that she imagines. The ending really made me say "wow" when John breaks into the room, his wife tells him the wallpaper has made her insane and he faints as she continues to creep along the perimeter of the bare-walled room.