The Yellow Wallpaper

     The Yellow Wallpaper is a short story written by Charlotte Gilman. The story takes place in a colonial mansion rented by a couple for the summer. The wife or protagonist suffers from what the husband calls temporary nervous depression or a slight hysterical tendency. The husband is a main and static character. He is a physician who is convinced of keeping her wife away and making rest to cure her.

      The mood appears to be ironic and cynical at times. The protagonist accepts to spend her summer at the mansion, but she is convinced that more time with friends and society would help more rather than being isolated. She accepts everything her husband dictates but when she is alone she does things her way.

     The protagonist uses a first person point of view to narrate the story. She writes journal entries when her husband or her sister-in-law are not watching her. She believes that there is something weird and supernatural about the house and tries to say it to her husband, but he only laughs and dismisses her ideas. She feels controlled by her husband but powerless when she tries to change her situation. The protagonist is certain that more work instead of rest or more socialization instead of isolation could cure her, but fears her husband’s reaction. Incapable of doing anything physical she starts obsessing with the wallpaper in her bedroom. As her mental condition starts deteriorating, she focuses on liberating the woman she sees trapped in the wallpaper. At the denouement of the story, the protagonist locks herself in the room, rips the wallpaper from the walls and when the husband finally opens the door he finds her crawling and he faints at the sight.

I believe that The Yellow Wallpaper is a very interesting short story. I think it is a feminist argument that wants to prove the therapy methods for mentally ill persons of later centuries as useless. At the same time it shows female subjugation and the sometimes internal struggle to challenge it. This work demonstrates how the main character had to defy the approach of an entire society and specially to find a way to do what she believed was right while dealing with an inflexible and unsentimental husband. At the end I believe that she compared her sanity to the wallpaper and just wanted to get rid of the façade, of all those tags imposed by society and just be herself, a wall.