The Yellow Wallpaper: The Crazy Woman

The Progressive Era has certainly been the era of progress during those years that it lasted through. However, the lives of those living before and during the time endured many hardships to bring about the change. In particular, women were the group that led strict lives to follow the conducts set by society, their husbands, and even other women. Although some women were educated, they were not allowed to write. But now imagine reading a story about one of those women who is slowly losing her sanity, only to realize at the end of the story that it is written by the crazy woman herself. The reader travels the journey through her perspective alone and is able to feel the raw emotions, such as horror and terror. One way to define horror and terror

Her use of sensory words to describe the wallpaper and how is she is seeing things within the paper show she is not in her rational mind. The woman claims the wallpaper smells yellow (Gilman); a color cannot be smelled. Her senses are heightened because of this wallpaper. In her depiction of the wallpaper’s design, the narrator writes in great detail the images she is discovering. The curves of it “commit suicide”, the patterns “crawl” and “creep”, and there are “unblinking eyes are everywhere” (Gilman). In her mind, she is animating an inanimate object. The wallpaper becomes a terrifying object for both the narrator and the reader. Strangely, she also sees a woman trapped inside of the wallpaper, shaking invisible bars. Possibly due to her own circumstances, she is imagining herself as that very woman inside the wallpaper. Like the woman trapped, she also feels imprisoned and helpless. She repeatedly asks, “What is one to do?” (Gilman) as if she has no choice on what she wants to do. Her use of physical words to illustrate the wallpaper allows the readers to first feel her negative emotions but then sympathize with