Happiness In The Yellow Wallpaper

Mentally Trapped

“If by ‘happy’ you mean trapped with no means of escape… then yes, I’m happy,” a quote by a feminist group called Anne Taintor Kitchen, a serious of scenes explaining a housewife’s insanity inside the home. The nineteenth century was an era where a wife had one job to please her husband and obey, the same applied to the narrator of The Yellow Wallpaper who had to obey her doctor husband on her treatment of postpartum depression. Throughout the story of The Yellow Wallpaper, by Charlotte Gilman, the narrator’s submission of her husband, inactivity in the world, and obsession with the wallpaper leads to her confinement inside the wallpaper.

The wife, in The Yellow Wallpaper, is married to John a physician who has diagnosed her

The rest cure was the standard treatment during the nineteenth century, but with the completely isolation from everything “For many patients, this cure was worse than the condition itself.” (Kirszner and Madell,379), as for the narrator the isolation causes unstable mental thoughts about her surroundings. Her husband will not let her see her family, children, friends or even write. In the beginning the narrator feels that writing is what will make her feel better but to John’s disapproval she must keep it a secret. She explains that she wants to write in spite of him however, even the narrator sees that it exhausts her to be “… sly about it, or else meet with heavy opposition.” (380). Though writing may be good for her mind the secret keeping from her husband is creating an unhealthy situation. The narrator keeps spiraling down into insanity because she believed no one is there to help her and continues to hold her true thoughts a

During her isolation, the narrator becomes interested in why it was there and begins to believe it affects her directly. At first, she hates the wallpaper and understands why the residents before would tear it up in the room. She describes the paper looking at her and mocking her feelings, “This paper looks to me as if it knew what a vicious influence it had.” (382). Suddenly her interest changes and becomes very fond of the wallpaper because she continues to dissect the pattern it creates. She spends hours on hours just following it until she finds a “some sort of conclusion” (384) as if the pattern could speak to her. After becoming so obsessed with the pattern her mental state begins to dwindle again, and one night she wakes up stands up and sees a figure in the wallpaper from the moonlight. This figure was of a woman a shadowy looking woman, which is actually the narrator’s own shadow. At this time, she has become so unstable that she believes there is a woman trapped inside the wallpaper. The woman begins coming out during the day, creeping around the narrator inside the house and outside. On the last day of her stay, the narrator believes she can save the woman in her prison, pulling and shaking the wallpaper off with help (she believes) from the shadowy woman. While the narrator locks herself in the room, believing she can do whatever she pleases “It is so pleasant to