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The Yellow Wallpaper Essay

736 Words3 Pages

In the story “The Yellow Wallpaper”, the author tells us about a woman that is suffering from an illness that was most likely postpartum depression. The woman of the story in the narrator and this story is written like it was her journal that she kept in secret. She is married to a man named John, who is also the physician that is treating her for her illness. He kept her locked in a room at the very top of the house that was once assumed to be a nursery. It had bars on the windows, scratches on the floor and dull yellow wallpaper. Although the story seems to be about this woman and her illness, the mentions of how her husband treats her and how the wallpaper seems to change show a deeper meaning to this story. The narrator’s husband treats …show more content…

She describes this wallpaper as very dull and has a weird pattern to it. Throughout the story, she tells us that the pattern on the wallpaper changes and she eventually sees a woman behind bars. The narrator is the woman she sees in the wallpaper. She uses the wallpaper to symbolize herself and how she is changing throughout the time she has been in the room. When she was first locked in the room the paper was just scratched up and discolored. At this point she was fairly healthy but you could say she was “scratched and discolored” because she had an illness, her child had been taken away, and her husband treated her like a child. Later on, she has gotten a little sicker and now she sees the wallpaper peeling and random spots at the bottom of the walls like children have been playing, this is when you can see that her illness is getting worse. At the end, she sees the woman behind bars. The narrator was basically behind bars. She had been locked up and told to do nothing so she is envisioning herself in the wallpaper like she is trapped. Being trapped in a room with no one and being told to do nothing but sleep and rest is enough to make anyone go mad. This story is her journal that she has kept in secret. This had to be a secret because her husband said that if she tried to write it would just make her illness worse. In a way, this writing made her go crazy a little slower because she actually had something to do

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