The Yellow Wallpaper

I first read this short story last summer, in American Women’s Studies. It was, and still is, a great study of the emerging voice of female writers of the late 1800’s. It, like so many others we have read, speaks loudly of the “unheard” woman, who desperately seeks self-expression, but finds herself at odds with an overbearing patriarchal society. Like “The Awakening”, Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s tale is one of a heroine who felt suppressed by her husband and society as a whole. Unlike Chopin’s Edna, we feel more emotion for and from the narrator in the “The Yellow Wallpaper”; the horror experienced by the narrator is felt by us.
We feel for this character, we sympathize with her plight, even though we do not entirely understand her circumstance. Did her problems begin with the birth of her child, or was she perhaps a bit “nervous” already? Certainly being left on her own with nothing to occupy her mind, her husband’s best medical advice, was the worst thing to do, as it just fed into her anxiety and frail mental state. Her hallucinations of the women trying to get out of the wallpaper seem to echo her own inner desire to get out of the room, out of the stifling conditions she felt. As she “crossed over” and became completely delusional to the point of thinking that she was the one trapped in the wallpaper all along, we begin to see how desperate her situation is. In fact, we see that it is she, from the start that has destroyed the room. Her husband did appear to care for her, and in his ignorance, tried to provide her a place to recuperate; he acted out of the best advice of the time, as foolish and backwards as it was. Her stepping across him in the last line as she made her rounds of the room probably served as some sort of triumph for her, as to her she had conquered her captor.