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In the late 1800s, Charlotte Perkins Gilman wrote what seemed to be a diary of her time in a sanitarium after she was treated for having a nervous breakdown. She wrote not only to inform the reader, but to have the writing help her in a therapeutic way. Here, the narrator explains her discomfort towards being forced to live in an open room and the fact that her husband and physician deny her mental state. Apparently, it is then realized that as she continues to stay in this sanitarium, which is supposed to help her, her conditions only worsen. As we move along down the story, she starts describing her feelings towards the wallpaper in her room. This yellow wallpaper in her room affects her in every aspect of her mentally ill state.
At first, the narrator starts off by describing the wallpaper and how she finds it disturbing. “The paint and paper look as if a boys’ school had used it. It is stripped off-the paper- in great patches all around the head of my bed, about as far as I can reach, and in a great place on the other side of the room low down. I never saw a worse paper in my life.” ( 766) She goes on about how the patterns are in different shades and certain things can be seen in certain lights. The narrator feels a form of anger towards the everlastingness of the wallpaper as it wraps around the room in a continuous pattern. “ Up and down and sideways they crawl, ad those absurd, unblinking eyes are everywhere.”(768). At one point, she believes that the wallpaper moves during the night which makes the narrator feels a sense of creepiness crawling under her skin. Every night, she would stay up with sleepless eyes staring at the wallpaper.
One night the narrator finally figures out that a woman on the wallpaper moves when the room is dark and the light of the moon shines through the windows. “ Then in the very bright spots she keeps still, and in the very shady spots she just takes hold of the bars and shakes them hard.” This part of...