The Yellow Wallpaper

This week’s reading was phenomenal. The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman is complex and has such depth that to only read it once is to be doing it a great disservice. There are so many ways to look at this piece and I feel as if I’ve only scratched the surface. I want to get so much deeper into it and learn the meanings of the many different situations that occur.

Jane, who we learn late in the story is actually the narrator, is suffering from a mental illness of some sort, one that her doctor husband tries to help her deal with, even though his ‘dealing with’ means Jane must acknowledge that there is really nothing wrong. She is merely nervous or easily excited. Of course this only makes Jane feel worse because she knows there is something wrong; she feels so sad and feels such despair--yet the fact that her husband says it is nothing only makes it worse for her. The wallpaper we see becomes, in a way, one of the main characters.

Jane has a room upstairs in what was once a nursery. The bed is nailed to the floor; the windows have bars on them and the walls are partially covered with a horrible yellow wallpaper. The paper has been torn in places. It is old and faded and when the dampness reaches it, it smells. It is a smell that permeates the entire house and clings to everything. Jane finds herself mostly confined to this room where the wallpaper takes on a life of its own. She finds herself trying to form patterns within it and one of those patterns “lolls like a broken neck and two bulbous eyes stare at you upside down.” The eyes don’t blink and they follow Jane everywhere. At night, when the moon shines in, the wallpaper forms bars. Jane is trapped within the room, just as she is trapped within her illness.

The illness, I believe, is post-partum, because we learn that she has recently had a baby. Even by today’s standards, post-partum is often misunderstood. Very recently, there was a great deal of publicity surrounding it when one celebrity went as far as to say that the post partum depression suffered by another celebrity was mostly of her own making and that it wasn’t a real condition. Given the era that this piece was written, the doctors were completely unaware that such a thing even existed.

Jane sees a woman on the other side of the wallpaper, a woman who is struggling against her wallpaper bars trying to escape. Jane helps that woman escape by finally locking herself in the room and going at the wallpaper with ferocity and tearing at all of it she could reach. However, I don't think the narrator actually wants the woman to escape. She has a rope with which to tie the woman up when she is finally freed from the wallpaper. In the end, the narrator refers to Jane in the third person and she becomes the woman in the wallpaper.

There are a few situations within this story that I did not understand, for thing what does the creeping signify? The narrator sees a woman creeping about, “I think that woman gets out in the daytime! And I’ll tell you why—privately—I’ve seen her! I can see her out of every one of my windows…I see her on that long road under the trees, creeping along, and when a carriage comes she hides under the blackberry vines.” Is the creeping woman really there? Is it the narrator who has distanced herself so far from reality that she views it from afar? Another is the fainting husband. What causes him to faint and why is this important to the story?

I enjoy reading literature of this type because I know there is so much that is not plainly written that the reader must think about and find out about. It was a great piece and I’m looking forward to digging into it more deeply.