The Yellow Wallpaper

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The Yellow Wallpaper

The story of The Yellow Wallpaper begins with a family going away on vacation. It is revealed later that there are repairs or renovations being done on their regular house. The wife in the story believes at first that the house is haunted since no one has occupied the house for so long, but she finds out that it was only because of an ownership dispute.

The main reason that the family goes on vacation is because the woman is sick. Her illness is most likely some form of a mental disorder. Her husband, who happens to be a physician, tell her that all she needs to get better is rest and to be around no stimuli.
The woman automatically thinks something is wrong with the house, but she could not figure it out right away. One of the first things she does not like about her and her husband’s room is the wallpaper. She claims that it commits every artistic sin and is not made with any laws of radiation, alternation, repetition or symmetry.

The woman starts to see mages in the wallpaper, and then she sees them move around and change as the light in the room changes. As time goes on, she begins to see a woman creeping around behind the front patter on the wallpaper. She eventually sees the woman in the wallpaper shake the front pattern that acts as a form of a jail for the woman. The wife writes that she thinks the wallpaper woman gets out from her “jail” during the day since she sees her creep around outside her window during the day.

Towards the end of her vacation, the woman tries to figure out a way to get the top layer of the paper off from the bottom one. On the last night, she pulls off yards of the top layer while the wallpaper lady helps her out. Then in the morning, the wallpaper begins to laugh at her and she declares that she will finish getting off the top layer that day. She continues to pull at the paper while it laughs at her. At the end she decides to climb behind the first layer of wallpaper and creep as the wallpaper lady did. Her husband arrives and gets into the room after some time and then faints because he realizes his wife has gone stark raving mad!

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