I Spy a Woman

In Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper,” the narrator finds herself in a sort of obsessive paranoia over the pattern on the walls of her summer house. The narrator, plagued by a “nervous depression—a slight hysterical tendency” (9), is unable to understand the reality of her situation. She believes that the pattern on the walls is solely for her purpose, and she dedicates her days to interpreting it. While I was reading the story, I began to draw parallels. The narrator’s obsession with the wall is similar to her obsession with her sickness—she is constantly affected by both.

I believe that part of the reason the narrator is so intrigued by the moldy wallpaper is that when she sees it, she sees part of herself. The wallpaper “has a kind of subpattern in a different shade, a particularly irritating one, for you can only see it in certain lights, and not clearly then” (76). This “subpattern” is similar to her personality. John, her overbearing husband, does not seem to understand what his wife is going though. He simply suggests that she rests and remains useless. But of course, any somewhat sane person is not capable of “resting” all day. So she takes to a new hobby—interpreting what is on the wall.

Because she feels so misunderstood, the narrator turns to something that can not judge her. Her ideas of what the wallpaper is saying can never be wrong. Furthermore, the wallpaper will never let her down because no matter what, it is always there. The narrator’s loneliness and sense of being misunderstood is remedied by her faithful yellow wallpaper.

Another parallel between the mesmerizing wall and the narrator’s anxiety is that she is frustrated by both, yet she cannot seem to forget either. She makes it clear that she is becoming exceedingly interested in the pattern when she says, “On a pattern like this, by daylight, there is a lack of sequence, a defiance of law, that is a constant irritant to the normal mind. The color is hideous enough, and unreliable enough, and infuriating enough, but the pattern is tormenting” (141-2). This “tormenting” pattern is similar to her disease. She continually blames her oddities on the fact that she is “sick” (8). No matter how hard she may try, both her disease and the wallpaper will continue to haunt her.

The narrator’s interest in the wall is far deeper than anyone else’s interest because she alone engages in the practice of solving its mysteries. When her husband and her husband’s sister observe the wall, she is a bit angry, “I have watched John when he did not know I was looking, and come into the room suddenly on the most innocent excuses, and I’ve caught him several times looking at the paper!”(159). The narrator feels a special bond with the wallpaper because she alone has studied it in such depth. She is the only one that can see the woman behind the pattern, thus making her the only person so deeply affected by the wallpaper’s ordinary features. She even deems herself most knowledgeable of its secrets, “There are things in the wallpaper that nobody knows about but me, or ever will” (118).

The narrator’s initial bewilderment and frustration towards the wallpaper takes a dramatic turn as time goes on. After having stared at the wallpaper for many an hour, she gains a comfort from it. She even keeps her obsession a secret from John, “John is so pleased to see me improve! He laughed a little the other day, and said I seemed to be flourishing in spit of my wallpaper. I turned it off with a laugh. I had no intention of telling him it was because of the wallpaper”(164-5).
The narrator’s final destruction of the yellow wallpaper occurs when she sees the woman “creeping up and down” (196). She can no longer handle the consistently haunting wallpaper, so in attempts to protect herself from the scary woman, she rips apart the walls. The narrator’s destruction of the walls is in essence her break way from her obsession and her disease. She is finally able to look at both things no longer as constraints, but as passages to freedom (704).