The Yellow Wallpaper

Another of our readings that I found intriguing was “The Yellow Wall Paper.” It tells a disturbing story of a woman who is mentally ill. Ironically her husband is a doctor who takes care of her treatment, but he fails to help her by denying her sickness for what it truly is. He treats her like a child calling her a silly goose at times. The things that he says to the woman she repeats in her head making it seem like it’s what she believes. The setting is placed in a large summerhouse miles away from the nearest town. She is sent to this house for the treatment her husband hopes will work. The only source of freedom she revives is through her writing, which is forbidden by her husband. It all begins with the room that she is staying in. She says the room was covered in hideous yellow wallpaper with a repeating pattern. After a few days she is looking at the wallpaper all the time, at first looking at it in the light and the dark. Then following the pattern around and around looking for and end to it. Which could symbolize her searching for a meaning in her life because really she is the wallpaper, because after studying the pattern she notices the pattern were figures of women stuck behind bars. She wants to get “this woman” out of the wallpaper to free her. In retrospect she is trying to free herself. It’s hard to see this in the story since a woman with a mental illness is narrating. In the end she locks herself in this room and rips all the wallpaper off because it’s the only thing she thinks about. Her husband runs into the room to see her going mad and faints. Some say that the husband found her hanging there dead because the woman mentions having a rope tied around her waist. But then the reader has to question “who” wrote the end of the story, since it was supposed to be written in her secret journal, if she is dead. It also says that the woman walked over the man’s body after he fainted because she was walking along the walls of the room like she was mad. So is she dead and having an out of body experience, or is she still alive?