“There is a recurrent spot where the pattern lolls like a broken neck and two bulbous eyes stare at you upside down. I get positively angry with the impertinence of it and the everlastingness. Up and down and sideways they crawl, and those absurd, unblinking eyes are everywhere. There is one place where two breaths didn't match, and the eyes go all up and down the line, one a little higher than the other.” (649-650)
In this quotation of “ The Yellow Wall-paper” by Charlotte Perkins Stetson, We are seeing the narrator describing a very detailed description of what she sees on the yellow wallpaper. The yellow wallpaper is in her room that she shares with her husband, John. John picked the room for her because, the room needed space for two beds. The narrator is living inside an empty mansion with her husband, and her brother who are both physicians and her sister in law. Both physicians have diagnosed her as a “ Nervous patient” who is “forbidden to work until she is well again.” The narrator begins to write about her first day at the mansion and how she likes her new room. She describes it as " It is a big, airy room, the whole floor nearly, with windows that look all ways, and air and sunshine galore...."(648) It's almost as if the room was perfect. The tone and the wording the narrator uses are very precise. "Sunshine galore" meaning enough sunlight and lots of air.
But further into the story she finds one spot. That one spot on the Yellow Wallpaper is the imperfection of the room. It is a "Recurrent Spot" which means it keeps occurring over and over. "Pattern lolls like a broken neck" the narrator compares a spot on a wallpaper to a broken neck of a person or something living hanging loosely. The Comparison is quite strange because when a normal person sees a spot on a paper they would just assume its dirty. It wouldn't remind them of a person's broken neck. "And two bulbous eyes stare at you upside down" now the narrator's imagery is violent and it doesn't seem as if the narrator is mentally stable. "I get positively angry with the impertinence of it and the everlastingness," here the narrator knows the wallpaper is irrelevant but she says it is endless and she cannot avoid watching it. Here it is as if the "eyes" are watching her every move, "Up and down and sideways they crawl, and those absurd, unblinking eyes are everywhere." She feels as if the eyes are watching her as she writes about them. Here is the climax of her losing her sanity because she starts describing even more graphic images that do not exist.
The narrator wrote about the wallpaper because she has been in that room for two weeks. For two weeks she hasn't been able to express herself with anyone because her ideas aren't valued as much as John's. During that time period, women's ideas weren't valued as much as men's ideas. The narrator hides her writings from everyone because they believe that's what made her "sick" in the first place. She isn't literally ill it's just she started to think logically. The narrator believes if she could just tell someone her ideas she would feel better because they tire her. "I think sometimes that if I were only well enough to write a little it would relieve the press of ideas and rest me!"(649) But the narrator is sane at that moment but after such a long period of time being trapped inside that room she snaps and starts to hallucinate and become insane. She starts to see women crawling out the wallpaper and other things that do not exist. It's as if the Women she saw crawling out the wallpaper was a reflection of herself being free. The narrator becoming insane was the only way of her becoming free.
The narrator was sane at the beginning of the story but after being convinced by everyone around that she is "sick" she actually became insane. Towards the end of the story, she thinks about committing suicide by jumping through the window. "To jump out the window would be an admirable exercise, but the bars are too strong to even try."(656) She finally feels free to do what she wanted. The narrator was always being controlled, physically and mentally. When John sees his wife at this phase he faints and can't believe what he has done. The narrator has changed completely she doesn't want the outdoors anymore. "I don't want to go outside. I won't, even if Jennie asked me too." (656) If she was sane she would have rushed to the colorful garden outside that she likes. The narrator became insane, because she has been staring a old wallpaper for a long period of time. John is the person responsible for this, he should have just let her write and express herself with others. The story ends with him on the floor fainted and the narrator talking to him. This Classical problem is still relevant because society still has roles for Women. When Women go outside these roles, society talks bad about them.
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