Blog 2

“The Yellow Wallpaper” written by Charlotte Gilman Perkins was about a woman who suffered from a mental illness. The narrator and her husband John rented a colonial mansion, a secluded estate for the summer hoping that it would do well for the narrator and to help her with her recovery. The narrator suffers from what her husband who is a physician, believes is a "temporary nervous depression." The narrator is living in a house in which she does not feel comfortable, in a room she hasn’t picked out, she is not allowed to leave the house, she must stay in the room up-stairs, where the bed is nailed to the floor and the room is decorated with yellow wallpaper. Her husband John said she must get bed rest and not to engage in any activity. So as the narrator spends all day in that room, the narrator begins to become obsessed with the wallpaper. “The paint and paper look as if boys’ school had used it. It is stripped off –the paper-in great patches all around the head of my bed… I never saw a worse paper in my life. One of those sprawling flamboyant, patterns committing every artistic sin”. (566) The narrator has nothing to do all day so she starts to follow the pattern of the wallpaper and she becomes so obsessed, all she does is think about it, and where the pattern leads to and where it stops “I lie here on this great immovable bed- it is nailed down, I believe- and follow that pattern about by the hour… I start, we’ll say, at the bottom, down in the corner over where is has not been touched, and I determine for the thousandth time that I will follow that pointless pattern to some sort of conclusion”. (568). Being in that room with the wallpaper, does not help the narrator at all, I believe it made her worse. Her husband John believes that would help her recover but, it made her mental illness worse as the time went on and progressed. When the narrator finally came to her breaking point with the room, the wallpaper, and everything going on around her, when she had enough of it all she ripped all the wallpaper off, “As soon as it was moonlight and that poor thing began to crawl and shake the pattern, I got up and ran to help her. I pulled and she shook. I shook and she pulled, and before morning we had pulled off yards of that paper”. (573) Once the narrator pulled off the wallpaper she felt like she was freeing herself, she felt like she was the women trapped in the wallpaper and that was the only way she could release and free herself was by tearing it down and off the walls to a clean slate.