Charlotte Perkins Gilman's "The Yellow Wall-Paper"

"The Yellow Wall-Paper"

Charlotte Gilman's "The Yellow Wall-Paper" is a story of the wife of a doctor. The doctor and the wife decide to rent a (cheap!) house for three months, while they wait for their own house to be built. The doctor's name is John and he has a sister named Jane who watches over both the house and his "sick" wife. According to John, the wife is sick through "over working her mind", but the wife does not agree and instead writes a secret diary which she must keep hidden so that neither John nor Jane can find her thinking or writing. The wife acts against John's wishes in her diary by expressing her ideas and suspicions. This angers the "Enlightened" John who believes only the reasonable to exist (nothing unreasonable exists). However, the story also centers around one room, which during the night, when John is around (occasially also when Jane is around), serves as a prison for the wife. The wife begins by describing the room with its prison like features (there are four windows but they are all tightly barred and the bed is hard and nailed to the floor). However the worst part of the room for the wife is the yellow wallpaper. She described this wallpaper being "a constant irritant to a normal mind" (1664). Throughout the story the narrator (the wife) studies this paper in secret and describes it in her diary. The wife eventually comes to the conclusion that there is a figure trapped behind the wallpaper during the night which during the day roams around the world in one of the four windows of her room. Finally, on the last day of the rent, the wife decided to tear down the wall paper. The wife locked the door while she did this and refused to let John into the room telling him to get the key for himself and finally, when John enters the room, the wife says that she "got out" and John faints.

Another Enlightenment v. Romantic idea clash can be seen in this story. John personifies an Enlightenment man who believes only that which is reasonable exists, however his wife believes the opposite, and believes that there is more than reason. The wife's desire for the unreasonable personifies and persists in the yellow wallpaper. The wall paper is "unreasonable" as it has no design and is harsh to the eye, and also is one of the reasons that the wife persists in writing and thinking. Whenever she stopped thinking she would always return to the strangness of the wallpaper and what "came out of it". Finally in the end the "Enlightened" John falls to "unreasonable" effects. This is an ironic stab against Enlightenment where the man who did not believe in the "unreasonable" fall prey to its ills.

"Now why should that man have fainted? But he did, and right across my path by the wall, so that I had to creep over him every time!" Where is teh narrator during this quote, and why does she add the words, "every time"?