Pardon my french but...WTF

I started reading The Yellow Wallpaper last night and I thought it

was just another run of the mill woman-in-peril type story. However, after finishing the last paragraph, I must admit, I was scared to be alone! Like I had just finished watching a horror movie. When Gilman writes at the end "I kept on creeping just the same, but I looked at him over my shoulder"(MLM p.937), I imagined this demonic, crazy looking woman a la the excorsist looking back at me, which then resulted in me mouthing to myself a long exaggerated "whaaaaaaat?".

So back in the begining, the narrator is apparently suffering from a hysterical tendency (which today means it was that time of the month for her), her husband John, decides that with all his great medical expertise, she should just be put in a room with wallpaper so bad she describes it as "committing every artistic sin" (MLM p.927). She goes on and on about how horrendous this wall paper is, yet after about a month, after being on bed rest and not being able to write down her thoughts, she says shes "really getting quite fond of the room in spite of the wallpaper. Perhaps because of the wallpaper"(MLM p.930). Now this is when I believe she starts losing her marbles. She is so intrigued by the patterns on the paper that she spends all hours of the day and night just trying to get from point A to B. It's really quite sickening that this all could have been avoided if her husband would have paid more attention to what was really going on with her.

Let's talk about symbols shall we!? So obviously the main symbol here is this damn wall paper. It is the bane of her existence during her time in the house yet it becomes her saviour. She BECOMES the wall paper and the wallpaper becomes a part of who she is. The pa

per is slowly coming off the walls which can speak to her sanity slowly dilapidating. Speaking of hallucinating, the narrator in this story reminded me of the main charachter in Franz Kafkas brilliant novella The Metamorphosis. Both these stories really tap into ones own psyche during times of emotional distress.

So to conclude, The Yellow Wallpaper is a testament to how far psychological medicine has come since the time period of when this was written. Historicism plays a huge part in analyzing this story, however feminism is prevelant because there is no mention of any female doctors or even females giving their opinions as to why Gilman is going through these emotions.

In other words ladies, don't let a man tell you how you feel! (unless it's a real doctor! then you should probably listen up!)