COM 7 A06

"The Yellow Wallpaper" by Charlotte Perkins Gilman

When I first began reading “The Yellow Wallpaper,” I felt sympathetic to the protagonist’s situation. In the beginning of the passage I thought to myself, here is a woman who has been locked in a room because her physician husband deems her to be emotionally unstable.  She probably has fallen victim to the superstitions against women at the time, and as a result, her husband has locked her in a room so that she could receive the “resting cure.” However, at the end of the passage, I began to think that the protagonist was actually crazy after all. Once the protagonist comes to her own conclusion that the wallpaper is trapping a ghostly woman, she is enlightened, and her entire view of the room has changed and so has her demeanor. At the end of the passage, the protagonist repeatedly used the word “creep” to describe her movements. She also describes herself as “coming out of the wallpaper,” just as the ghost-like woman she describes seeing earlier. Both of these details give me the impression that the woman’s mind is not quite sane any longer. To me, the word “creep” has such a malicious connotation. When someone “creeps,” they do not plan on getting caught for what they are doing, which probably means they are up to no good. The protagonist doesn’t seem in the right state of mind when she says she has come out of the wallpaper because obviously, that is impossible to do, however, to the protagonist, it appears normal. That, to me, is the definition of insanity. Perhaps the husband was right in locking her in the room with the yellow wallpaper after all.