Susan's Loss Of Emotions By Charlotte Perkins Gilman

Even a marriage that is sensibly built to last cannot endure. The story begins with a beautiful and intelligent Mr. Matthew and a well matched Ms. Susan. They are both hardworking, wait until their late twenties to marry, and once fully committed only make wise decisions in an effort to save their marriage from ever failing as others do. While reading the first few pages I see that Lessing is showing an all too perfect situation.
“Everything right…what everyone would wish for, if they could choose. But people did feel these two had chosen; this balanced and sensible family…was due to them because of their infallible sense for choosing right” (416). How can any two people always make the right decision? Susan and Matthew are human beings
Susan writes about her children and how she longs to have them off her hands.
Frighteningly enough, once Susan has her freedom she longed for she is mentally/physically incapable of using it to benefit her. Of her second day of freedom she writes, “There she sat and tried to calm herself looking at trees…But she was filled with tension, like a panic; as if an enemy was in the garden with her” (420). This is the beginning of the end for Susan and her writing following this moment constantly reminds me of that of Gilman’s narrator. They are consistently different in the way that Susan is always using third person, except for maybe two or three paragraphs in which she uses first. Besides that, their writing, which is representing their minds, is the same. Gilman’s narrator repeatedly writes about her visions of the woman in the wallpaper who is stuck behind bars. Susan repeatedly writes about seeing this demon/enemy man with reddish complexion and ginger hair who she says, “ …is lurking in the garden…sometimes in the house, and he wants to get into me and to take me over” (428). The difference between the two narrators here is that Gilman’s truly believed she was the woman while