Charlotte Perkins Gilman

I think that Charlotte Gilman’s “The Yellow Wall-Paper” would be an excellent story to tell around Halloween.  Her characters slow spiral into complete insanity was thrilling. I think that she really pulled from her experiences while she was going through her own depression.  

Jane, the main character, really didn’t seem that sick at the beginning of the story. It sounded to me that she was going through at normal bout of post-partum-depression, which would have been treated with medication now. John, her husband/doctor, is treating her how they treated these types of issues in that day. I don’t agree with how he took her out into the country and isolated her but if he really believed that would be the best thing for her maybe he should have stayed with her. This also makes me think that Gilman may have been treated in this manner as well when she was “sick.”

The yellow wallpaper was what Jane focused on since she was made to spend so much time in her room. She was made to take an hours nap after every meal and to sleep in there at night. This in my opinion was one of the things that made her condition worse. She just kept staring at that yellow wallpaper and started to see things in it until it became an obsession. Then discovered what she thought was a woman trying to break out of the paper. This, to me, was symbolizing her trying to break out of the depression. Though quickly her hallucinations get worse when she starts to see the woman “creeping” around outside during the day. It’s like she sees herself as she is moving around during the day, though she does say the woman hides when a carriage comes.

This continues until the last day that they were going to be living in that house and John wasn’t coming home. During that night she started ripping all the paper off the walls trying to help the woman escape her trappings. When Jennie, her husband’s sister, came to see her in the morning she had most of the paper off and Jane convinced her to allow her to stay in the room to “sleep.” Jane not wanting to be disturbed locked the door and through the key out the window.

Then I noticed that it says “I” but then has Jane as one of the subjects so I think that her depression had gotten so bad that she had developed schizophrenia and the “woman in the wall” was the second personality that finally took over when she peeled the paper off.  I didn’t quite understand what she did with her “well hidden rope” but I think that she used it to kill her husband so that she (personality #2) couldn’t be suppressed again.  I could be really off with my analysis.