"The Yellow wallpaper"

Essay by jillybCollege, UndergraduateA+, February 2006

download word file, 2 pages 0.0

The narrator of "The Yellow Wallpaper" loses touch with reality and the world in this story. The story begins as her husband takes her for a summer vacation to a Colonial mansion, a hereditary estate, which she thinks is haunted. Her husband, being her doctor also takes her there as treatment after being diagnosed with a nervous depression, which her treatment includes that she do almost nothing active. He forbids her from writing any of her thoughts and feelings in her journal, so she does this secretly. She complains that her husband makes fun and belittles both her illness and her own thoughts of things.

In the secret journal is where she starts describing the yellow room. At first she describes the room as "revolting", and doesn't think so much about it, but the room has something about it, and she starts looking at the color of the wall and its patterns more often.

She still would like to leave the house at times and discusses leaving the house, but her husband makes light of her concerns, effectively silencing her. Each time he does so, her disgusted fascination with the paper and patterns in the yellow room grows. As she fixates on the room, she describes it as having rings on the wall and barred windows. The color is repellent, a smoldering unclear yellow with a dull orange in places. It had one of those patterns committing every artist sins. Se crawls around the floor getting the yellow paint on her clothes, looking at the pattern as it becomes clearer. It began to resemble a woman stooping and creeping behind the main pattern, which looked like bars of a cage.

By the end, she starts to see a woman behind the bars, at night creeping around trying to get...