Yellow Wallpaper

The narrator in Charlotte Perkins Gilman's short story, "The Yellow Wallpaper," is truly insane from the very beginning of the story; she just falls deeper and deeper into insanity as the story progresses. In the beginning of the story she tells of how her husband diagnoses her insanity, "a slight hysterical tendency,"(633). Later in the story she admits her own condition, "I get unreasonably angry with John sometimes...I think it is due to this nervous condition."(634). John, her husband, makes her stay in bed and rest through the story; this contributes to her gradual slide into complete insanity. She begins to show signs of her schizophrenia. She sits in her room starring at the walls and begins to envision people stuck behind the wallpaper. She talks to them and plots to help release them. "The front pattern does move--and no wonder! The woman behind shakes it!"(640). "They get through, and the pattern strangles them off and turns them upside down, and makes their eyes white!"(640). This schizophrenia later changes into, a multiple personality, as she believes that she is the woman that is trapped behind the paper. The whole time the wallpaper moves because she is creeping around the room in a frantic circle that she cannot stop. "There is a very funny mark on this wall, low down, near the mopboard. A streak that runs around the room."(640). She made this streak by her unending creep around the room, "But here I can creep smoothly on the floor, and my shoulder just fits in that long smooch around the wall, so I cannot lose my way."(642). In the end she tells John, "I've got out at last, in spite of you and Jane. And I've pulled off most of the paper so you can't put me back."(643). At this John faints, but she remains in the room continuing to creep, for she believes that she is this woman that creeps out among the trees, down

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