Yellow Wallpaper

In the story “The Yellow Wallpaper”, the narrator was a mother whom had postpartum psychosis after the birth of her child. The family went on a trip and the mother was confined to an upstairs room. The room was bared up, the wallpaper was ripped, and the room was basically empty. The women’s husband locked her up in this room and told her this was best for you. He would tell her things to make sense and convinced her, that he knew what he was talking about just because he was a doctor. As the narrator is deserted in the room alone, she begins to write a journal of the wallpaper she sees. As days go by she continues to study the wallpaper and starts to hallucinate. She thinks she sees a woman in the mix of the wallpaper. She begins to rip down the wallpaper, so that she could free the lady that she thought was there. The last day of summer at the house, she continues to rip the wallpaper and walk around the walls of the room. Her husband had come up to get her, but she refuses to unlock the door. When he finally gets the key and unlocks the door; she is found walking around the room touching the wall. She says to her husband, that she is finally free. Her husband faints or dies, but I believed that she killed him. I also believe that the women she saw in the wallpaper were an image of her. She probably felt trapped in the room and when she freed herself from the wallpaper, that is when she was free from her husband and the room she was confined in. This mother was insane and at the end of the story, it is believed that she killed her husband. She had showed many signs of postpartum psychosis, by hallucinating and killing someone around her.

  I also interpret “The Yellow Wallpaper” to have a meaning for women at the time. Why should women be locked up and why should men have all the power and say so. She was pretty much powerless in the story. Her husband was the one who thought he knew best for her and made her decisions for her. She might have felt downgraded and fragile to the situation. This story may seem a bit insane but it has a purpose to it, if you really understand the meaning of why it was written.