the yellow wallpaper
The narrator thinks the large, airy room at the top of the house must have been a nursery, since its paper is stripped off in great patches and there are bars on the window to prevent children from falling. She objects only to the room's yellow wallpaper, which she finds irritating, repellent, and full of contradictions and outrageous angles.
Already, small, sinister details of the room foreshadow a difference between its appearance as a 'nursery' and its true past. Seeing the narrator misinterpreting these details—the stripped off paper, the bars on the windows, which might be the result of children or a previous insane occupant—creates suspense and a sense of powerlessness in the reader. It also suggests that the narrator's experience that eventually drives her crazy is one shared by other women; that the narrator is just one of many women affected by society's treatment of them.
As John approaches, the narrator hides the diary where she is writing this note.
By hiding her only form of self-expression, the narrator rebels against John's orders both as her husband and her doctor. This contributes to the growing gap between how she appears to him, and how she feels inside.
The narrator is beginning to distrust both John and Jennie, and suspects that it is the wallpaper's fault. The narrator once caught Jennie with her hand on the wall, and she believes that Jennie is her rival in studying the pattern. Jennie says that she had noticed yellow stains on the narrator's clothing and was only investigating their source.
Her paranoia grows, and she blames the wallpaper, which is a symbol of her sickness. She is jealous of Jennie's interaction with it, anxious that only she should have access to the wallpaper's secrets. The yellow stains are a clue that some part of the story is being withheld in the diary.
In her memory, the narrator tells John that she wishes to leave the house. He objects to this notion, which he views as silly since there are only three weeks left on their lease and she seems to be recovering. She tries to insist, arguing that while she may be better in body, her mind is suffering. His tone shifts, from the indulgent scolding of a child, to a stern command not to entertain such a 'false and foolish fancy.'
Here, John asserts his traditional authority as doctor and husband, and embracing the traditional view that emotion or anxiety (seen as feminine) are 'foolish fancies' that should not even be considered. And so this desperate attempt by the narrator to make herself understood fails, as John cannot understand the difference between her outward appearance and inner suffering.
The narrator has made a discovery: the front pattern does move, because the mysterious figure of the woman shakes it by crawling around fast and shaking the bars formed by the shadows, trying to climb through. But the mysterious woman cannot escape the strangling pattern.
Here, the link between the mysterious figure and the narrator becomes clearer still. The narrator is similarly trapped, desperate to escape the grasp of her sickness but also the grasp of the society (and her husband who represents that traditional society) that has forced her into this room because of its views of women and mental illness.
The narrator begins with a description of the impressive summer home she has just moved into with her husband John. She is amazed that two 'mere ordinary people' could have secured such a place. She jokingly wonders whether the home might be haunted, since it was so cheap to rent. Her husband laughs at her suspicion, but, as she writes, 'one expects that in marriage.'
Hints that there is something strange about the house create the first sense of disconnect between its outward appearance, as a beautiful home, and its inner (perhaps sinister) life. John's laughter, and the narrator's sarcastic response, reveal the strained dynamic of their marriage and the fact that these dynamics are built into marriage—that marriage as it exists in the society of the time of the story involved such strains and power disparities.
The narrator describes the house in more detail, which is grand but seems semi-abandoned and a bit 'strange.' She doesn't like the room they have chosen to live in, but John insisted they take the nursery at the top of the house so that she could absorb the restorative air. Her whole life is scheduled by John, who is very 'careful and loving' so that she feels 'basely ungrateful not to value it more.'
If we read the narrator's tone in describing her husband's special care as sarcastic, it betrays her frustrated sense of powerlessness. She is unable to communicate, since John has removed her means of self-expression and dismisses any suggestion she makes about her own life.
A few family members visited for the Fourth of July, but they are gone now and the festivities, for which Jennie made all the arrangements, are over. The narrator is tired and depressed, she cries 'most of the time' when she is alone, although she stops when John is home. He has suggested that he may have to send her to Weir Mitchell, another doctor, in the fall.
Jennie continues to perform the domestic duties of the narrator, increasing the narrator's sense of guilt. She now hides her emotions from John, masking her inner life and making communication impossible. Weir Mitchell is the real life champion of the 'rest cure' that is being enforced on the narrator, and was the actual doctor who treated Charlotte Perkins Gilman, the author of this story.
From the window, the narrator sees John's sister, Jennie, approaching the house. She describes her as a 'perfect and enthusiastic housekeeper.' The narrator's attention then returns to the wallpaper, in which, when the light is just right, she can see a mysterious figure that 'seems to skulk' in a sub-pattern. Jennie's approach on the stairs interrupts her musing, and she hides the diary.
Jennie's easy acceptance of her domestic role only increases the guilt that the narrator feels with her own dissatisfaction with the domestic role into which she has been forced. The wallpaper's 'inner life' begins to take a more definite form in the troubled brain of the narrator. She hides all of this from her sister-in law.
The narrator goes on to describe her eminently practical husband John, who is a physician, and his dismissal of her worries about depression—she believes she is sick, while he thinks she has 'a slight hysterical tendency' and nothing more. She explains the cure he has prescribed her, which forbids any writing or intellectual work until she feels better. Although she disagrees with this lack of activity, she feels powerless to object.
John embodies a typically male view of the world—pragmatic, stoic, dismissive of anxiety—in contrast to his wife, and does not take her emotional concerns very seriously. The cure he has prescribed resembles that which the author experienced in real life, and restricts her self-expression outside of traditional gender roles.
The narrator is determined to remove the top pattern of the wallpaper from the one she sees underneath. She has discovered something that she won't tell the reader, since 'it does not do to trust people too much.' John seems worried or suspicious, and asks Jennie about the narrator's welfare, but the narrator claims to have seen through his loving disguise. She now believes that the wallpaper is secretly affecting John and Jennie.
Now the narrator has turned completely inward, away even from the diary, hiding her discovery as her last desperate means of self-expression becomes this mission to free the figure behind the wallpaper. We see John's worry, but the narrator is beyond making any attempt at communication with him.
The narrator finds one positive side to living in the nursery: it means that her baby is not exposed to the horrible wallpaper, and can be happy and well. She has stopped mentioning the wallpaper to her husband and Jennie, but she watches it more and more closely. She can make out the dim figure behind the pattern more clearly now: it is the repeated shape of a woman, stooping down and creeping around. She wishes John would take her away from the house.
The baby is a reminder of the role that the narrator is neglecting. Her relationship to the wallpaper becomes more secretive, as her isolation grows and her self-expression is restricted to this diary. The woman trapped within the wallpaper is almost a new companion. She senses a danger in this realization.
The narrator feels almost too weak to write, but she needs to express herself in some way to find relief. She has lost strength, and John administers a whole range of treatments. She tries to convince him to let her leave the house and visit her cousins, but cries and cannot finish.
The diary is the narrator's only remaining outlet for self-expression. John's treatments ignore her true sickness. Her failure to convince him to leave shows their inability to communicate, as she is trapped by her husband's authority.
The narrator confides in the reader that she has seen the mysterious woman escape the wallpaper during the day, creeping along on the shaded lane. The narrator knows it is the creeping woman from the wall, since most women would be embarrassed to be found creeping by daylight—she, for example, locks her door whenever she creeps during the day, so that John suspects nothing. She wishes he would leave their room so that she could be alone with the woman at night.
The narrator identifies further with the woman in the wall, and reveals casually that she herself has begun to 'creep' around the room during the day while John is away. This may be the source of the yellow stains on her clothing, and the mysterious groove in the wall that she had spoken of earlier - though still the question remains of whether the narrator herself has created that groove or whether she is now following a groove that was created by one or more others before her. The reliability of the diary begins to be called into question, whether because the narrator is purposely keepings things to herself or because, in her mental illness, there are things she is doing that she doesn't recognize.
The narrator admits to considering burning the house down to escape the smell, but she has grown used to it; it is 'a yellow smell.' She has also noticed a long, straight even streak in the wallpaper that runs all the way around the room, 'as if it had been rubbed over and over,' and wonders who did it.
The narrator's casually expressed plan to burn the house shows the extent of her illness, and the reader feels powerless to intervene (much as the narrator feels powerless to make herself understood). The streak in the wallpaper foreshadows the narrator's breakdown, and again suggests that others have suffered similar breakdowns in this room, which both adds to the general gothic horror of the story and suggests that the narrator's situation as a confined woman forced into the "rest cure" is not unique in her society.
Two weeks have passed, and the narrator feels significantly worse. John is away most days, and she is alone in the 'atrocious nursery.' She is frustrated by her husband, who cannot understand how much she is suffering. We learn that she has a baby, who is being cared for by their nanny, Mary, since the narrator feels too nervous to be with her child.
The narrator's child is a sign that this is a case of post-partum depression, which the author also experienced. It also represents the domestic role that she feels trapped within. John's profession as a doctor heightens the irony of his inability to understand his wife's suffering, and of the time period's dismissal of mental illness in general.
The narrator's focus shifts to the wallpaper. She says it looks as though it 'KNEW what a vicious influence it had.' She sees a multitude of expressions and crawling eyes in the 'impertinent' wallpaper, and remembers how she used to lie awake as a child imagining the expressions of her furniture.
The narrator's evolving relationship to the wallpaper mirrors her worsening mental condition. She expresses a belief in the inner life of outwardly inanimate things, like furniture.
While John is away, the narrator walks in the garden or lies in her room, staring at the wallpaper. She feels determined to find some sort of rhyme or reason behind its 'pointless pattern.' She goes on at length about its incomprehensible shapes, 'great slanting waves of optic horror.' The pattern also changes with the light of the day as she lies in bed watching it. Following its 'interminable grotesques' tires her, so she ends her diary entry to take a nap.
The narrator's obsession grows in her enforced idle isolation, and her need to make sense of the wallpaper is a symbol both for her inability to interpret or express her own inner life and her need for her mind to be creative and active in at least some way. The narrator's attempts to interpret the wallpaper also mirror the reader's attempts to interpret the narrator's diary entries.
The narrator has been staying in bed even more, and John encourages her rest by making her lie down for an hour after each meal. She only pretends to sleep though, and hides this from her husband, of whom she is 'getting a little afraid.'
The narrator's paranoia further isolates her, so that she consciously deceives those around her, hiding her true, inner life. She is weakened by the continual rest cure that is supposed to help her. And the distance between the narrator and her husband is actually making her distrust and fear him
The narrator is feeling an improvement in her mood. She says the change is due to the wallpaper, although John doesn't know that and she 'has no intention of telling him.' She is fascinated by its secrets and certain that, with the week remaining, she will be able to uncover them.
The narrator's sense of purpose has returned with this 'activity' of sorts, but the reader can see that it is a dangerous obsession. She is no longer attempting to express her inner life to John.
The narrator dwells on the irritating lack of regularity in the wallpaper, which defies her 'like a bad dream,' resembling a fungus. She explains the wallpaper's secret: it changes as the light changes. At night, the pattern becomes bars, and she sees the mysterious figure of a woman behind them. The figure puzzles and intrigues her, as she lies in bed.
The wallpaper's puzzling patterns continue to symbolize the changeable nature of the narrator's sickening mind. The fungus image is unclean, ill, ugly. The woman, trapped behind the bars of the pattern, seems like a double of the narrator herself. In fact, one could argue that the woman in the wallpaper is trapped in a way that is similar to the narrator within the story.
The narrator describes the room again, but less kindly this time; it is ravaged, with gouged and splintered floors, large tears in the wallpaper, and a great heavy bed that was the only piece of furniture present when they moved in.
These new details continue to suggest to the reader that the room served a more mysterious and dark purpose in the past, and is not as it appears to the narrator.
The narrator cannot reach the tops of the walls, and after trying in vain to move the heavy bedstead so that she can reach, she bites at one corner in frustration. She tears off whatever she can reach, and the wallpaper seems to shriek with laughter at her attempts. She writes that she is angry enough to jump out the window, but the bars are too strong- and besides, 'a step like that is improper and would be misconstrued.'
Trust in the narrator's reliability erodes further, since a new possibility- that the narrator has been rubbing against the wall and gnawing the bedstead before this point- emerges. The other possibility, that this room has been inhabited by a woman who went mad in nearly the same way, strengthens the sense that this 'illness' is an affliction common to all women, who are trapped by the constraints of society. Her idea of suicide is scarily casual, and the understatement she uses to dismiss it - that it might be 'improper or misconstrued'- is an indictment of the way that society's notion of 'propriety' has brought her to this point.
John arrives at the door, calling for an axe to break it down. The narrator tells him that the key is outside under a plantain leaf, repeating it over and over until he opens the door. When he enters, she says that she has 'got out at last' in spite of him 'and Jane,' and will not be put back. He faints at the sight of her creeping along the wall, and she continues to creep in a circle around the room, forced to go over his prone body with each turn.
Until now, John was blind to the inner life of his wife, both because it was hidden in her diary but also because his society and education as a doctor has taught him to dismiss such things. Now, though, as his wife's mental breakdown is complete, and her inner life has taken over her outer appearance, he is forced to confront it directly. That he faints marks a departure from his traditional "male role" of strength and self-control—it is an overwhelming emotional reaction, and suggests perhaps that he too has been constrained by his social role in a way that actually weakens him. Some critics think that the mention of 'Jane' is just a misprint of 'Jennie', but others argue that it suggests that the narrator is herself is named Jane and that she has become so dissociated from her sane self to the point that she here refers to herself in the third person, having "become" the 'woman in the wall.'