The Yellow Wall Paper

“The Yellow Wall Paper” was my favorite of all the short stories we read this semester and I enjoyed every moment of reading it. This dark story lives in a gothic environment with the old colonial mansion being described as beautiful, cheap, queer, strange, and untenanted.  The Narrator of the story is the women in the story whose husband has locked her away in the nursery of the mansion because he witnessed her undergoing some “hysterical tendencies.” This is an element of male dominated gender roles with the controlling husband thinking he is doing what is best for his wife but in all actuality keeping her isolated in the room is driving her to insanity.  The domineering husband is a doctor and tries to cure his wife of her post pregnancy depression but the wife is having hallucinogenic experiences when she stares at the yellow wallpaper. “There is a recurrent spot where the apttern lolls like a broken neck and two bulbous eyes stare at you upside down” is one of many examples throughout the story where the women sees things in the wall paper. When we discussed this short story in class, I felt intrigued when we dug into what the actual experience of finding expression in an inanimate object; like when you were a kid and you force your mind to see the outlines and figures in the dark as real things. This story is also a clear example of an unreliable narrator. The women is obviously unstable and at the end of the story she describes how a woman was trapped behind the yellow wall paper and then the perception shifts and you learn that she sees herself as the woman that finally escaped from behind the paper on the walls.