Yellow Wallpaper Conclusion

Throughout the story the narrator writes about the wallpaper as being a grotesque yellow and she wishes to be moved to another room, but as she keeps writing her feelings change about the wallpaper it starts to grow on her. When she first arrives at the mansion and enters her the nursery she describes the wallpaper as being “almost revolting; a smouldering unclean yellow, strangely faded by the slow-turning sunlight,” which illustrates she despises it and makes the assumption that the children before must have hated it.

When two weeks have passed she writes about her condition and mentions the baby. It made me think when it said “It is fortunate Mary is so good with the baby. Such a dear baby! And yet I cannot be with him, it makes me so nervous.” When it emphasized the word cannot, I thought of postpartum depression, which is a condition woman get after they have a baby. Woman with this condition can get suicidal depressed and may even result to extremes of wanting to kill their own baby. Which is why i think the narrator is put in the isolated nursery, especially when she describes the room with the nailed down bed, barred windows, and then the gate at the head of the stairs, like the room is keeping her imprisoned. Also, when she asks her husband to move to another room he just tells her that she is doing good and that he does not want to renovate the house when their just staying for three months. Which is practically saying that he doesn't want to fix anything due to the fact the room is keeping her from doing anything crazy.

But as the story continues the wallpaper makes her imagination run wild. With nothing to due except stare at the wallpaper she starts to see patterns and “a strange, provoking, formless sort of figure, that seems to skulk about behind that silly and conspicuous design.” As the weeks go by she looks at the patterns as if doing gymnastics on the walls and in her writings she describes the architecture of the wallpaper. As her observations grow, her body seems to weaken as if the wallpaper is taking over her imagination. As she continues on through the days her perception of daylight and moonlight become more interesting. It's as if the daylight is just simply a game or just a daydream of patterns in the wall, but in the moonlight “not only did the shadow woman first appear while John was sleeping, but the narrator also suspects that she is what John really desires, the secret he would reveal if he were given the opportunity to do so (Haney-Peritz 120).” In the moonlight its like the narrator becomes nocturnal and more in depth of this womanly figure that creeps her so.

As the weeks carry on the pattern has allured her mind, its like shes trying to discover its meaning through light. In the daylight the pattern plays tricks on her “You think you have mastered it, but just as you get well underway in following, it turns a back-somersault and there you are. It slaps you in the face, knocks you down, and tramples upon you. It is like a bad dream.” This wallpaper that was once so horrid has taken her curiosity to whole new level. For instance, that woman she keeps seeing, she not only appears at night, but also during the day. This woman appears to be the narrators 'repressed other' or 'suppressed self,' it is yearning for her to be uncanny, unreadable, and lawless. To be healthy and not sick, to be able to take of her child and not have her husband worry about her. This wallpaper has created this persona of which the narrator wants to become.

Her observations of this woman has lead her to believe that the woman is shaking the pattern, like she is trying to break through this imprisonment. “Sometimes I think there are a great many women behind, and sometimes only one, and she crawls around fast, and her crawling shakes it allover.”