The Yellow Wallpaper

After attending lecture, the significance of this readings deepened for me. The historical context of these stories add quite a bit of understanding to the eery passions of the text. While one instantly figures that these would be a Gothic text, pertaining to the horrifying mentality and nature of the protagonist, one quickly begins to discover there are more "feminist" (using that term loosely) context to it.

To begin with, "The Yellow Wallpaper" introduces the idea of loss of control, which is commonplace with women in the 19th century. First, the narrator is placed under a diagnosis she is very reluctant to agree with. She, immediately, recognizes that that her ailments aren't the physical ones that her husband and brother want them to be. The study of mental illness wasn't a strong suit for the medical field back then; thus, doctors attributed mental illness to physical weakness. Hence, the "rest cure" was meant to cure women for a disease that they (doctors) hadn't discovered yet: depression. Yet, since all the men of her life were in charge of her wellness, she had no choice in the matter. She was forced to comply or else face an even worse extreme (in the form of Weir Mitchell).

Once placed under this diagnosis, she is supposed to be stripped of all activity and communication. The rest cure entails that a person be subject a lack of these two elements of daily life,wholly shifting  their focus on resting and recovering. In other words, they aren't allowed to do anything but sleep in the same room for an indefinite period of time. One, now, recognizes what a terrible idea that is. Isolation and lack of brain use drives a person insane. Why would that in any way heal a person a woman, who is already teetering on the border of mental instability? It doesn't, which is why Charlotte Perkins Gilman wrote this story. It was meant to expose how such conditions actually endangers people.

Which leads me to the fundamental subject of the text: the yellow wallpaper. The narrator's instant unease with the wallpaper is the first sensation of the fantastic within the story. She, primarily, expresses a distaste for the wallpaper and leaves it at that. But the more time she spends in the "nursery" room with the hideous yellow wallpaper, the more sense of uncertainty she gains from it. This growing sense of uncertainty with the wallpaper confirms this fantastic light of the text through the growing descriptions the narrator gives of her experiences with the wallpaper.

The first notable experience is when she says she follows the patterns of the wallpaper but it becomes too chaotic for her to follow. It is almost as if she were mesmerized by it because she is completely lost herself describing it. Then, weeks later, is when she notices "the woman in the wall". Still, there lays this sense of uncertainty about what she is writing about. Is she describing a shadow, a part of the pattern, or is there actually someone within the wall? The more she writes about the women creeping out, how the lighting affects her movements, and how the bars seem to protrude about her, the sooner the reader realizes this isn't a supernatural occurrence at all. This is a psychological horror that the narrator is subconsciously giving herself. She is the woman in the wall. She is trying to break free from the walls and those barred windows. Her brain is trying desperately to tell her that she needs to break out of societal expectation. However, she hasn't realized it yet. I suppose this is my favorite part of the text because the reader experiences firsthand the terror of a mental deterioration these women were subject to but we are fully aware that it is happening. The narrator is still convinced a supernatural occurrence of a woman somehow being trapped inside the wallpaper.

Finally, she begins to snap. The "supernatural occurrence" of the wallpaper links with her logic and she begins to rip it apart trying to free this woman from the wall. Metaphorically, she actually unraveling the madness she descended upon and her new-found freedom from the domestic sphere. In the end, she waits to show her husband, John, what she's done. She's proud of her accomplishment: she's let the woman free (but she accepts that she is the woman) and destroyed all ties to her previous roles. This is exactly the point where the reader knows the story won't end well and has to analyze for themselves whether the ending is a supernatural event or a fantastic one. In my perspective, since it's unclear what condition she's in and what shes does, it remains a fantastic-real story because there is so much left to be explained but it has a great deal of reality in the scenario.