Journal #2 Gilman

Liana Laskin

English 48B

"The Yellow Wall-paper" by Charlotte Perkins Gilman

January 9, 2009

"When all usefulness is over, when one is assured of an unavoidable and imminent death, it is the simplest of human rights to choose a quick and easy death in place of a slow and horrible one." (From Gilman's suicide note, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charlotte_Perkins_Gilman)

Summary:

This story is a set of journal entries written by the narrator during the 1890s, who is being taken by her husband John, a physician, to a grand but "queer" house for the summer. John is her treating her for her "nervous depression," forbidding her from doing absolutely any work and confining her to a room upstairs that has bars on the windows, the bed bolted down to the floor, peeling yellow wallpaper, and a strange "yellow" smell; she begins to fixate on the wallpaper. After a while she sees that a woman is "trapped" behind the main pattern of the wallpaper. The narrator soon discovers that there are many "creeping women" in and outside of her room and the house as she slowly descends in madness.

Response:

After going through this story and really picking it apart, I began to realize that it become quite intriguing. The saying "truth is stranger than fiction" could not apply better! Ironically, I do not think the narrator completely went completely insane, but almost "woke up" from the life she was living, in a way; of course, she literally does go crazy. In the end, I think she becomes stronger than her husband because she is not a subordinate woman to him, but another creature entirely. This transformation really reminded me of a story I read for English 1B called The things They Carried, which was written about soldiers who served in Vietnam. I remembered the character of Mary Ann, a girlfriend of one of the soldiers who comes to visit him. When she first comes, she pretty and needs to be taken care of, but by the end of the chapter she appears in, she has transformed and adapted to her environment (Vietnam) so much that she becomes something that cannot be labeled. Although this did not happen because she went mad, the narrator really reminded me of Mary Ann. I also love that the story ends without really telling the reader what really happened. I could see just going insane in the room more than committing suicide in the end or even killed herself before the climax. And just like the wallpaper, more can be discovered after reading the story again and again.