The Yellow Wallpaper

I enjoyed reading Charlotte Perkins Gilman's "The Yellow Wallpaper". In fact, it was the reading that I have enjoyed the most so far. After I was through reading it, the first question on my mind was "What?" I thought the narrator in this piece was absolutely insane. She just went off on these tangents for the entire reading, mostly about yellow wallpaper, of all things. She imagined that it had an awful smell, that it reminded her of all the yellow things she'd ever seen - "not beautiful ones like buttercups, but old foul, bad yellow things", that there was a woman hiding behind the paper, and that at night the wallpaper had bars across it. Although her husband was not aware of it because such a condition did not exist at the time, the reading talks of a baby that this woman just had. Clearly, she is suffering from post partum depression.

Yesterday, we discussed in class of the relationship between the narrator and her husband John who is a doctor. Although on the surface it appears that John is domineering and does not let the woman have a mind of her own and is constantly telling her what to do, I feel that it is just not that simple. It is clearly obvious at the end of the reading how much John cares about her because he is willing to knock down the bedroom door with an axe to get to her because he fears she is in trouble. I think that, like most men, he truely cares about her and thinks that he is helping her when in fact, because he thinks he knows best, he may be harming her more than helping her.