What is the narrator’s situation?
What do you think of John?
What do you think of their marriage?
What is the purpose of the room she is in?
How does her description of the wallpaper change?
Why does it change?
What happens in the end of the story?
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The narrator is suffering from some sort of degenerative disease. Her husband, being the amazing physician he is, tries to help her by moving to a large mansion where he tries to take care of her. However, her disease seems more mental than physical but her husband will not belive in such things because it is not "logical." John is a rational person who only believes in proven sciences and despises anything that can't be explained with formulas or hard scientific data. I think that he means well when it comes to taking care of his wife but he is also very set in his ways and doesn't like to listen to anyone's opinions but his own and people like him. Their marriage seems to be more formal than anything. John takes care of her and she appreciates it but there really doesn't seem to be anything else there. The room she is in is meant to be a calm place for her to rest. I think that John also wanted to lock her away from the rest of the world so that no one would see her in her condition. Towards the end of the story he seems almost embarrased to have her around. At the begining the narrator seems to focus more on the color and shape of the wallpaper. She dwells on the yellow color and how the paper is ripped. As the story goes she begins to look at the smaller details of the paper. As this happens, her descriptions also become more malicious. As she thinks of the smell of the paper stalking her, she becomes fearful of the paper. Eventually she sees a woman beyond the paper trying to escape but the pattern is preventing her. She even begins to see the woman outside of the paper. The descriptions change as her mental condition deteriorates and she begins to lose her mind. The end of the story was fairly interesting in which she just completely loses her mind and starts to "creep" around the room. A distressed John comes into the room after finding the key and faints. The narrator then continues to creep over him.
ReplyDeleteThe narrator is suffering from some sort of mental disease that is causing her to slowly lose her mind. Her husband is a physician and seems like a good man. He is trying to do his best to put his wife in the best situation. He cares about her and doesnt just leave her even though she is going crazy. I dont think that there is much to their marriage. He cares for her and tries hard but because of her going crazy she doesnt seem to appreciate too much. At the beginning she kept saying dear john and all that but then she started calling him queer and not appreciating him as much. I think the purpose of the room is to isolate her from the world almost. I think he knows that she is losing it and doesnt want the world to know about it so he keeps her in this house on the outside of town and isolated in the bedroom. The description of the wallpaper changes as the story progresses. It starts out with smaller descriptions then as the story goes on and it starts to get to her more she gets more in depth with it. She thinks about it more and more until it eventually basically consumes her. At the end of the story she just loses her mind entirely.
ReplyDeleteI think that the narrator is likely suffering from an extreme case of post partum depression. During this time period there was very little known about mental illnesses and so they pretty much band-aided the situation. If they are recovering well physically, then that's good enough. They had very low standards then because they didn't know that total wellness could be reached again.
ReplyDeleteAlthough most people would look down on John I feel like I understand him and what he does. I also liked the salesman from the last piece, but hey apparently he's a universally hated guy, so i'm curious as to who will hate poor john. I think that John did what he could. He was not the saint that she needed to get well again, but perhaps he had the burdened of knowledge as a doctor. Perhaps it is that he was only too aware of what was really going on with his wife and no amount of devotion and no amount of whatever it was her whimsy wanted could save her. Was that his fault? No, it was simply medicine at the time. Should he be blamed that he became weak? Well he's human, and yea he wasn't there for her and he didn't really see through her acting, or maybe he did. Either way, I don't think he can be hated, he was simply human. One in a hundred people would have done differently, maybe less. I can't hate someone because they're not that one in one hundred.
They're marriage is a difficult thing because she is sick, and he loves her, but there's really nothing he can do. He was right when he said that it will be all up to her as to whether she gets better or not. That is not a thing for a husband to say to a wife, but that is the physician in him speaking. Which made the situation very complex and stressful on their marriage.
The room was simply to keep her from hurting herself or being seen. The bars on the windows were so she would not jump out in her illness and so that she was far from public eye. It was meant to help her heal with dignity. And though in the end it drives her mad. I doubt the outcome would have been quite so strong had there been another means of treatment but the family only did what they thought was best.
The wallpaper begins as an inatimate object that she is observing, and progresses into the real living thing. And as this completely lifeless thing becomes the most real thing to her, all reality escapes her. What is real is no longer there and the only real to her is this wallpaper. And as she loses her mind she loses her grasp of the fact that it's just wallpaper. In the end of the story she completely loses it to the point where everyone can see what's going on and that she no longer has the mental capabilities to act.
The narrator is slowly starting to lose her mind and become completely insane. I think that John is a good man and is truly trying to do what he can for her and make the best of the situation. He doesn't just discard her do to her condition. Their marriage is nothing special. They do not seem to have a spark between them but John cares for her and they can get along. The room helped to keep her in and out of the eyes of people. John wanted to help and if she can get better without hurting people or hurting her reputation in the process, all the better. The seems to develop into something deeper and deeper for her as the story progresses. At the end of the story there is no helping her, she has completely lost her mind
ReplyDeleteIt is obvious that there is something seriously wrong with the narrator, more serious than John realizes. (No ordinary person would need as many exclamation marks in their dialogue as she did.) John is too stubborn to see that she is not suffering from a physical illness, but rather a mental breakdown. In an attempt to make her better, John took her to a house that he rented and kept her up in an isolated room for a few weeks. Although John said he had been seeing improvements in her situation, that couldn't have been further from the truth.
ReplyDeleteI think that John is an idiot. He is the kind of guy who thinks that he has all the answers and I blame him for most of his wife's issues. It could be that he doesn't want to admit that his wife is mentally ill so he is in denial, but that still doesn't excuse his decisions. Leaving a mentally unstable woman in a room, all alone, is a really stupid idea. Even though he showed up now and then, she said that she was alone a majority of the time she was there.
I think that there marriage has lost its meaning and caring for his wife has become nothing but a burden to John. From reading the story it seems as if the only reason John sticks around is because he feels obligated to care for her. The purpose of the room is supposed to be that it isolates the narrator from the outside world and gives her time to relax and "recover". It was also to keep other people from seeing her as if John was ashamed to be seen with her.
As the story progresses, the narrator's description of the wallpaper becomes more and more ridiculous. She first described it the way a "sane" person would by giving its color and other aspects of its appearance, but by the end of her stay she was talking about little woman creeping out of the wallpaper. I believe that this change occurs because staying in the same room for an extended period of time would be enough to drive anyone crazy, yet alone someone who already has some mental instability.
In the end of the story the woman is certifiably insane. If there was any question about her sanity before then, it was gone after reading the final paragraph. It provided a very creepy tone and she sounded as if she was possessed by demons.
Well I remember watching the movie of this in Mr. Sortores class. All it was was a lady in a room looking at yellow wallpaper and going crazier everyday she stared at the wall . She was going out of her mind. Ok now I'll read the story lol. One of her problems is that her husband does not believe that she is sick. She describes her condition as nervous which she goes from being happy one minute to wanting to kill someone the next. She is a very by polar person. She very intensly takes in every detail of the room and describes at first how she thinks it is so ugly and then describes why she thinks that someone could get lost in the wallpaper, as she does.She is a very depressed person and sees the worse in everything she does, which isn't much. All her husband wants her to do is stare at the wall all day and not read or write or even think for that manner. Her husband does not see what really is going on with his wife, he is oblivious or maybe he doesn't want to believe what is slowly happening to his wife. She can not be with i think its her child but im not sure. this makes her even more nervous or crazy. She should not say nervous and just use crazy because nervous is not correct and not powerful enough. She really misses her garden. she always looks out the windows to see it. I think that the garden was once a true passion of hers but has been tooken away from her. I think that when she was a kid this craziness in her started. I can see this when she says that as a child she used to get more terror and entertainment out of blank walls and furniture than most children could find a in a toy store. The wallpaper makes her even more crazy because she talks about it all the time and starts to go on a rant about it. It is really hard for her to talk to her husband about why she is "sick". She really starts to go crazy when she thinks the wallpaper is moving. At the end of the story she goes totally insane she rips off the wallpaper so her husband can't put her back into the wallpaper. I liked this story to some extent but it got really weird and crazy at the end just how the author intended it to how cool .
ReplyDeleteThe narrator has become very sick, mentally sick that is, perhaps beyond the point of repair. Her initial condition was not that serious based on what the story gives us...prior to being locked in that terrible room she had a "temporary nervous depression, a slight hysterical tendency". I believe she may have had post-partum depression since she had recently had a child, a condition not understood or treated at the time. Due to the ignorance of those around her she slipped away into insanity...
ReplyDeleteJohn would appear to be a good husband but truely he is a control freak and thinks so highly of his intelligence/ability as a physician that he can't see his own wife's mental deterioration. He really doesn't have a clue-a person with mental instability can't just "think" or "will" their way out of their sickness. They need support and outside help, someone who won't just let them sit and brood. If he cared enough about her he would make her health his first priority, not an unfortunate circumstance he had to deal with.
Their marriage is very one-sided. Initially the narrator does whatever John wishes because she is totally dependent on him, but eventually she deceives him and leaves the room or writes to escape her own personal hell for awhile. He gives her no alternative. A marriage should be a partnership not a totalitarian state.
The purpose of the room she is in is to "let her rest" and "recover" from her condition. It is also a convenient place to keep the "crazy wife" out of the way while everyone else goes about their own lives. It was always the only solution to the problem but really ended up worsening the problem on a massive level.
At first she described the wall paper as an annoyance that she would have to deal with while she recovered. However, after awhile she realized that it was her only companion, her only escape from the stress of not being able to recover. She begins to analyze it and focuses on it to the point of insanity. Her description of it changes because she focuses on it so much. If you had one thing to focus on day in and day out I don't know how you couldn't see it in more than one way.
By the end of the story the narrator's obsession with the wall paper reaches a climax where she intermixes her reality with the fantasy world she sees in the wall paper. Her insanity makes her unable to distinguish between what is real and what is not. I think she lost hope of ever getting better and since she could not just fix herself she focused her time and energy on other things. Because of multiple mistakes made by the people around her, the society she lived in, and her own helplessness she became insane.