The Yellow Wall-Paper By Charlotte Perkins Stetson

If you stare at a wall-paper long enough will it seem to move? Wall-paper with crazy designs in a strange house could seem creepy to anyone, but to one woman it is the object that leads to her to become senseless. The Yellow Wall-paper is about a woman who had a baby, and moved into a different house with her husband for a summer. She eventually goes crazy due to many things, but the focus is on some yellow wall-paper. In The Yellow Wall-paper by Charlotte Perkins Stetson, the treatment of a woman and some odd yellow wall-paper causes her to go crazy. What started out as a nervous condition she gained after having a baby, quickly changed into insanity due to childlike treatment, the inability to connect with her baby, and her disgust and fixation
with the wall-paper in the room her husband chose for them. The way the woman is treated contributed greatly to her worsening mental state throughout the story.
Her husband John, who is a physician, is convinced in the beginning that his wife has temporary nervous depression, and that all she needs is some time alone to recover. She takes “phosphates or phosphites – whichever it is, and tonics, and journeys, and air, and exercise” (648.) John has her taking medicines, and doing certain things to help her to get better, but it essentially contributes to the problem. The wife is not allowed to do much of anything so Johns’ sister Mary takes care of everything for her. They leave her basically alone to do nothing all day to try to get better, and John sees physical signs as proof she is getting better when she is actually getting worst. The narrator herself knows she is not better in her mind, but because her husband is happy with her physical improvement she does not say anything. Even if she were to speak up and tell John how she feels, or what she thinks, it would not matter because he had a habit of not listening to her concerns. The narrator had mentioned changing the wall-paper and John “laughs at me so about this wall-paper!” and “he said that I was letting it get the better of me, and that nothing was worst for a nervous patient than to give way to such fancies”(649.) John, as a physician, believes that he knows what is best for his wife, but in the end what he thought was good for his wife was in reality the worst thing for
her, because she is not able to be normal witch was the goal of the treatment. The baby is rarely mentioned in the story, but he is another important factor to his mother’s health.
The woman had a baby and it was taken away from her. She was not allowed to see it for at least three months. She was subjected to the pain of knowing who has her baby, but not being able to do anything about it. Just as everything else Mary was the one taking care of the baby. The lady says, “It is fortunate Mary is so good with the baby. Such a good baby! And yet I cannot be with him, it makes me so nervous” (649.) She realizes that not being with her baby is worsening her condition, and she is still not able to see, or care of the baby. To make it worst, the room John chose for them was a nursery, and child play room. This has to be a constant reminder of her baby. She tried to convince John to choose another room, but to no prevail, “John would not hear of it” (648.) He only wanted to stay in the room that was the nursery, the room that would remind her of the baby she could not hold; the room with the yellow wall-paper that she hated so
much. The last and most prominent cause of the woman’s insanity was the yellow wall-paper. This yellow wall-paper of all the papers is most significant because of the yellow color. Yellow is usually a happy color it stimulates the brain in a positive way. Irony is created in the story because the usual meaning of yellow contradicts how it affects the woman. From the beginning the majority of what the lady talked about was the wall-paper, and how she hated it. She described it in many ways; she described the patterns, the colors, and anything else she imagined about it. The woman became obsessed with figuring out the wall-paper. At one point she was so intent on figuring out the mysteries of the wall-paper that she would stay awake at night, she admits that by saying “John was asleep and I hate to wake him, so I kept still and watched the moonlight on that undulating wallpaper till I felt creepy” (652.) She even got to where she thought there was a woman trapped in the wall-paper behind the front pattern, and that she moved and shook the paper. The last night they were at the house, she was alone in the room and “As soon as it was moonlight and the poor thing began to crawl and shake the pattern, I got up and ran to help her” (655.) The woman’s obsession with the paper got so bad overtime, that combined with the other negative factors in her life she became completely crazy. Her craziness peaked at the end after she ripped off the wall-paper and her belief in the woman had changed to her believing she was the woman that had been trapped. She had become the lady that was in the wall-paper that had escaped finally. In all the madness the woman became unbearably crazy, but also she became free. The woman, in the story The Yellow Wall-paper, becomes senseless due to poor treatment, the inability to interact with her own baby, and yellow wall-paper. Everything she had to go through together made her mentally loose herself, but as she was losing herself she also became free. She became free of all her nervousness, free from her husband, from her baby, and free from the wall-paper. Wall-paper may seem like just wall decoration, but it could end up being more than that.