"The Yellow Wallpaper"


 

"THE YELLOW WALLPAPER"

 

Brief Summary:

The female narrator has just had a child and is experiencing what her husband believes is nothing but “nervous depression and a slight hysterical tendency”. They move to a summer house, which is described as haunted, beautiful and strange. Instead of putting her in the bottom level, sunny nice rooms of the home, the wife is sent to the upstairs room that she believes use to be a nursery but as the story progresses we as readers start to believe it as a room for insane people. The bed is nailed to the ground and has bit marks about it. The windows are barred. The floors are scratched, gouged and splintered, the wallpaper is an “unclean yellow”, it has patterns upon it that move, that look like white eyes, and the room has a “yellow smell”. As the narrator spends countless hours in this room her mind begins to slowly believe that there are women maybe just one that is held behind the horrid wallpaper. Throughout the story we see that the narrator is trapped, trapped from the outside, doomed to live as her husband would want, in absolute solidarity. She believes that she is the one that is jailed behind the yellow wallpaper. She believes it is she that is creeping and clanging each night to get out. At the last day of the summer before they are to leave and go to their real home, the narrator releases herself. At night, the narrator helps the shaking woman in the wallpaper by peeling off the wallpaper halfway around the room. The next night, the narrator locks her room and continues stripping the wallpaper. She tells John she has peeled off most of the wallpaper, and now no one can put her back inside. John faints and the narrator creeps.