Yellow Wallpaper Insanity

The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman is an almost personal explanation of a woman driven to insanity by her husband’s impractical techniques of trying to improve her quality of life and remove her from the grips of depression. The unnamed narrators husband, John was not purposefully trying to push her over the brink of wellness, but because of the times and lack of knowledge of how to promote growth from mental illness, the disease became worse. Essentially the narrator went from being mildly depressed to, as Gilman put it “being pushed as far as one could go towards insanity and get back” (Gilman). This story definitely highlights the times of the nineteenth century where mental illness and overall women’s illness was disregarded …show more content…
Daytime naps and sleep filled nights became almost impossible because the wallpaper seemed to be moving. The pattern was impractical to try to follow, dodging, diving, and dipping down. She would have a grip on the traveling wallpaper and then it would plunge, “committing suicide, reaching out at outrageous angles, destroying themselves in unheard-of contradictions” (Gilman) creating more untraceable roads for her eye to follow. Sometimes she would catch a glimpse of a face or a figure in the wallpaper, but it would never stay for long. She would try to describe the wild actions and inexplicable movements of the fading wallpaper to her husband, but it was all in vain, he was not the kind of man to believe outlandish things “John is practical in the extreme. He has no patience with faith, an intense horror of superstition, and he scoffs openly at any talk of things not to be felt and seen and out down in figures” (Gilman). She began sleeping less, due to the fact that the wallpaper was beckoning her, leading her on to look harder, see more, figure out the pattern of the wallpaper. Her daytime “naps” became longer and more frequent, but napping was not what she would be doing. She knew there was something there for her, something in the wallpaper that needed her. The faces and figures she would see in the wallpaper become casual visitors, always lurking about where only she could see. In the walls, in the windows, in the flower beds, there was something always lurking. After many days and nights of staring, the figure finally revealed itself, and it appeared to be a creeping women, actually there seem to be many women. The women wanted to get out, an escape was necessary. They would pound on the wall behind the paper, pound and shake and slam on the walls, to the narrator, it seemed as if they were moving the whole mansion with their quakes. Eventually she knew