Summary Of The Yellow Wallpaper

The short story of Gilman is written in first person singular: it is a diary, the personal notes of the main character. We see the plot through her eyes and we gain admission to her most intimate thoughts and emotions, and thus, we can see the changes that happen in her mind. The evident nervous breakdown happens right in front of our eyes: the woman’s relation to the yellow wallpaper clearly reflects the stages of insanity.
In the beginning, we hardly understand the title, as the wallpaper is not mentioned for long. The first note about it is relatively objective, a description of our other main ”character”. The woman calls it ’repellent’ and ’revolting’, and her dislike is expressed fully in row of many other negative and vivid adjectives too. ’I should hate it myself if I had to live in this room long’.
As we continue, the wallpaper appears more and more often. Parallel to the lady’s physical improvement (according to her husband) the wallpaper occupies her mind. Locked up in the room by her husband, she has nothing but imagination, and in lack of living stimuli, she is forced to use her imagination. Step by step the
She calls suicide ’improper’ and something that ’might be misconstrued’, but only the bars on the window stop her from jumping out in her rage of not managing to move the bed. On this peak of the story, where she locks herself up in the room, she sees ’many of those creeping women, and they creep so fast’. The picture becomes more and more vortical as first she tries to watch them through the windows, turning her head, than she starts to creep along a line around the wall. This is how her husband finds her when finally entering. She does not attack him, but he faints by the sight of his wife’s movements and words: ’I’ve pulled of most of the paper, so you can’t put me back.’ And she creeps through the body of the man who locked her up by his orders of