Fiction Paper - The Yellow Wallpaper By Charlotte Perkins Gilman - Essay Example

At the end of the story, the woman is seen creeping around the walls of the room, after having torn away the wallpaper as high as she can reach, seeking a way of entering their world or releasing them from the walls where they used to hide. While the story is not necessarily intended to be understood as a ghost story, instead addressing the very real mental conditions that can be and were forced upon women in particular as a result of their constraints within society, it can be understood from a supernatural perspective.

Reading this story from a realist perspective, the woman slowly loses her sanity as a result of her inability to conform to societal norms. At every stage of her illness, it can be seen that the husband has little understanding of how she feels and little regard for her own input regarding what might help her. He looks at the world from a very scientific perspective and is incapable of moving beyond the hard facts to consider his wife’s emotional needs. The couple takes up residence in an upper room of the house, thought to have once been a nursery, with bars on the windows and old faded yellow wallpaper attached to the walls.

This wallpaper plays a large role in the progression of the woman’s illness as she begins to see women creeping around inside it, trying to escape the oppression they, too, have experienced. In the end, the woman is completely insane, creeping around the walls herself after peeling the wallpaper off as high as she can reach, even creeping over her husband, who has fainted against the wall, in order to continue her progress unimpeded. Although she realizes there is something wrong with her, she writes that the men of her world, her husband and her brother who are both physicians, do not agree that she is sick, describing her condition as being a “temporary nervous depression – a slight hysterical tendency” (Gilman, 1899).