The Yellow Wallpaper
One would think that a doctor would recognize a patients downfall into mental insanity, especially when he lives with her. However, in The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Gilman, the narrator does not identify with her fall into madness as the reader is not sure they were able to diagnose post partum depression during that period of time. Johns wife, who is the narrator and also remains unknown, secretively writes in a journal about her three months stay at the colonial mansion, which she initially felt was haunted. While writing her thoughts, what the narrator later comes to find out are the stages of post-partum depression gone awry. In an attempt to make his wife well, John actually drives her into a false sense of security and her reality becomes skewed. She is overly obsessed with the yellow wallpaper in her room, and it is the lady in the wallpaper she blames for her behavior more than that of Johns.
The one point which was interesting was that she sees a woman behind bars trying to get out in the pattern of the wallpaper. Still this was a bit confusing as to why she thought she was the woman behind the bars in the wallpaper (p447). This might be the only thing in this story that didnt make sense to me. The pattern with the woman seems to be related to the way she is being treated by her husband, John. However, the correlations is beyond grasp or comprehension. John is very protective of her wife because she is in all reality a very sick woman, but in certain segments of the story he is very patronizing to her. She feels trapped because of this and the way she sees the paper must be an indication that she must in fact be crazy. She sleeps more so during the day and stays up late at night to stare at hideous, tattered, yellow wallpaper.
John also tries to control how and what his wife should think, He says I wasnt able to go, nor able to stand it after I got there (p441). He tells his wife, you really are better, dear, whether you can see it or not. I am a doctor, dear, and I know. You are gaining flesh and color, your appetite is better (p442). Again, he uses the fact that he is a doctor to insinuate his "rightness" and basically states that the narrator is wrong because she is not a doctor.
Clearly she makes a case for herself as being delusional when she states that she sees a lady out of every window walking around the gardens, or walking down the road and so on. The narrator distinguishes that she is not in her right frame of mind and is most likely the reason she is in the room with the rings on the wall and the bars on the window. What the narrator leaves, which was confusing at the moment was when at the end of the story is how she acquired the key to her room. The narrator doesnt mention how she got it.
During Johns leave from the house when he is working on advanced cases, this allows the narrator to focus more on the wall paper and allows herself to cross the line of reality and insanity. Initially the narrator leads to thoughts of John cheating on her when he was gone because his wife was going crazy. It appeared that he wasnt actually being a Dr, but playing Dr! So during his absence, his wife goes off the deep end, but later learned that was not the cause of her depression.
All in all the way John treats his wife is as though she is a child and is very condescending to her in tone and action, along with his sister who is there to keep an eye on her. The narrator shows how this action would cause her to doubt herself and make her suspect that John thinks she is crazy. Finally at the end of the story and again in Johns absence she is able to tear all of the yellow wallpaper down and realize that it is her who was in the wallpaper and who was trying to escape essentially pushes her over the edge. She mentions towards the end of the story that she says, I suppose I shall have to get back behind the pattern when it comes night, and that is hard! This action causes John to pass out, but still leaves me to question how she got the key to her room, locked the door, and put the key on the ground under a plantain leaf. Initially she says that she throws the key down into the front path, but does not elaborate more so on that. Throughout the story, the narrator gives an account of her mental state of being and how she views her husband and sister-in-law given her condition. Initially she is not well; however, becomes more and more on the brink of insanity as she combats the yellow wallpaper.
Works Cited
Gilman, Charlotte Perkins The Yellow Wallpaper Literature: An introduction
to fiction, poetry and drama.
EDS: X.J. Kennedy and Dana Gioia
11th Edition, New York: Longman, 2010
Pages 436-447. Print
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