-Charlotte Perkins Gilman-
By: Kyla Webb
"A big airy room, the whole floor nearly, with windowns that look all ways, and air and sunshine galore. It was a nursery first and then playroom and gymnasium, I should judge, for the windows are barred for little children, and there are rings and things in the walls. The paint and paper look as if a boys' school had used it. It is stripped off-the paper- in great patches all around the head of my bed, about as far as I can reach, and in a great place on the other side of the room low down I never saw a worse paper in my life."
It is the wallpaper that becomes the concentration of the entire story and what the narrator constantly obsesses over. She describes the paper as:
"The color is repellant, almost revolting; a smouldering unclean yellow, strangely faded by the slow-turning sunlight. It is a dull yet lurid orange in some places, a sickly sulphur tint in others."
This constant obsession just eats away at her, and she starts to see a moving figure within the wall, something that she had described as a "strange, provoking, formless sort of figure, that seems to skulk about behind that silly and conspicuous front design." SO not only is she sill obsessed with the wallpaper, but now she is seeing things/people within the wallpaper. One night, she had described what she saw, "The faint figure behind seemed to shake the pattern, just as if she wanted to get out." It is obvious that throughout the story that the narrator is infatuated witht the figure and the wallpaper that one day she just loses it and tears down all the wallpaper and believes that she has set the "figure" free and tells John when he walks into the room, "I've got out at last," and I, "in spite of you and Jane. And I've pulled off most of the paper so you can't put me back!"
The story then ends with John fainting and the narrator crawling around the room like a baby and crawling over John.
There is no doubt that anyone who read this story for the first time wasn't thinking that this author was crazy herself in writing this story. I for one thought that after I had read it for the first time. However, through analyzing and discussions you learn to look past the insane narrator, and look at the deeper meanings of the story. I found that there were tons of different themes going on thoughtout the entire story, but I think that one of the most important ones is being able to h ave relationships that you are able to actually talk to other people who could potentially help you; unlike John, who basically treated his wife (the narrator) like a baby and not letting her have a say in anything she did. She had a daily schedule that John had mapped out for her so that she had every second of her life accounted for. Now, some people would argue that might be good for someone of that particular stature, but in my mind I think that the John was a tad bit more crazy than the narrator, even though the story was based on his wife. As we saw throughout the story, the narrator bottles up her feelings and emotions and in the end they all come in a way that does make her appear to be insane. So that is why I think people need to have trusting relationships so that they are able to go and talk to other people and not keep their all their feelings bottled.up inside and then eventually have those feelings deteriate and have the person act out in a way that is not normal.