Thoughts of a Cynical Bastard

The Yellow Wall-paper

The narrator, whose name we learn at the end is Jane, is married to John and dominated by him. As she recuperates with neurasthenia in a room in a rented mansion, he does not allow her to do anything but rest, and especially forbids her from the creative work of writing. She finds solace in her journal and, as her stay wears on, the yellow wallpaper in her room. At first the wallpaper's ugly pattern irritates her, but she later sees the figure of a woman imprisoned in the bar-like pattern. Her earlier concerns‹about not being a good wife and mother‹fade away as she exercises her creativity in decoding the wallpaper, which seems to her almost like a literary text. She soon identifies completely with the woman, who tries to break free from the domesticated prison of the wallpaper by moonlight, the time when women are free from the oppressive regularity of masculine sunshine (a motif Gilman develops throughout the story). The narrator's growing insanity‹realistically rendered by Gilman's increasingly choppy prose style‹somewhat offsets her developing awareness of feminist liberation and masculine oppression. However, the story's final image of her "creeping" around the room while she peels off the wallpaper suggests progress: while feminists may have to hide in the shadows for now, eventually they will rise up and tear down the shackles of domesticity. I find it interesting that the author wrote this story at a time that feminism wasn't really that popular yet. Here is a strong female character, though physically sick, that truimphs in not letting her husband have the last laugh.

I appauld and thoroughly enjoyed reading this.