A review by ayla_derammelaere
The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman

adventurous emotional inspiring mysterious reflective tense fast-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? Character
  • Strong character development? Yes
  • Loveable characters? Yes
  • Diverse cast of characters? Yes
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

5.0



The editor claims some of the story can be based on the experiences if Charlotte Perkins herself, since she had depressive feelings but it really doesn't matter : this short story is one of the best and most intruiging stories I have ever read.

We follow 3 months in the life of a young woman who is married to a doctor and just had a baby. They rented a house on the countryside during the summer to help her.gey rid of her depressive feelings.
In our days, this makes us think about a postpartum deppresion. But following the story, a postpartum depression is not the correct diagnosis.

John (=her husband) doesn't really believe she is sick, she just needs to rest and don't use any of her intellectual skills, so no writing. 
The bedroom they occupy used to be the nursery and has yellow wallpaper. Charlotte is not happy with this room, especially not with the strange colour the wallpaper has.
John needs to go more and more often to the city to help his patients, leaving Charlotte all by herself. His sister is there to accompany her but leaves her by herself most of the time. The more time Charlotte spents in her room, the more fixated she becomes on the wallpaper. We know that her child is in the house as well but besides her writing loving words about her child, she never tells us if she goes to visit.

After a couple of weeks/months, Charlotte is convinced the pattern on the wallpaper changes depending on the light. She sees upside-down eyes in and drawings of fungi. John however, believes his wife is getting better : in his mind, she rests a lot ; he doesn't realize she barely sleeps but is continiously following the pattern of the wallpaper, trying to figure out its meaning.

One night, Charlotte sees the paper moving. When she goes out of bed to explore this, she notices that the shape behind the first layer of paper, is that of a woman, trying to escape the paper. Charlotte laughs, knowing the woman will never escape.

When her time her is becoming limited, she knows she has only a few days to figure it out. She now barely sleeps and paranoia kicks in : she notices her husband and his sister looking at her and talking about her. She knows she needs to hurry.
Suddenly, Charlotte understands : all the eyes on the wallpaper are heads of the woman (eyes are a sign of paranoia) : when trying to escape at night by pushing her head through the lines on the wallpaper, the lines cut of one of the heads and it stumbles somewhere on the paper, leaving the woman to keep creeping to another spot.
During the daytime, Charlotte now also sees the woman creeping around on the domain of the house. She feels pitty for her since she can not have contact with anyone and is forced to keep creeping, feeling shamed.

During the last day, Charlotte's psychoses comes to it full size : she has pulled of as much of the wallpaper as she could as she knows that she was the woman trapped behind it. To make sure the moonlight will trap her again, she destroyes the paper. She locks her bedroom door to not be disturbed when creeping through the room, exploring what there is to see. She sees a pattern on the bottom of the remains of the wallpaper and follows it all through the room, creeping. When John finally makes his way to their bedroom, he faints when he sees his 'healthy' wife creeping all over the floor. She tries to explain that she will not go back behind the wallpaper, continiously creeping around the room and over the body of her fainted husband, unable to take a different route or to stop.

The reason why this story is so amazing, for me, is because it all sounds logical in the beginning. We can understand what it feels like to be overwhelmed by life and/or having sad feelings bringing us down and draining our energy.
Only little by little we start to notice her obsession with the wallpaper. At this stage, she still tries to find help with her husband but he 'doesn't believe in anything that isn't visible'. When her mind retreats even more, she stops sharing her thoughts and (probably) transfers her feelings of paranoia to her husband and his sister. She lies to them and hides her ideas and thoughts.
With no one left to correct her way of thinking,  no one to bring her back to reality, the psychoses grows and grows until it ends with her loosing herself completly and transferring who she is to a made-up persona. She no longer is Charlotte, who came there to rest and heal. She now is the woman who was trapped in a room where she didn't want to be, escaped with the help of a stranger and following the logics and patterns only she can see by creeping over the floor.

This story is such a beautiful way of explaining how our minds (try to) flee from reality when we don't want the life we are living (choosen or not). She feels herself being trapped in a house, in a marriage, in a parenthood that takes away the one thing she loves : writing. A married woman, and definitly a married mother, should only focus on her family. So instead of being the wealthy mother and wife of a doctor, she becomes the creeping woman who escaped her prison to follow a path only she can see.