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1. 
   epollock Teacher
   High School - 12th Grade

   eNotes Editor

   hakikiturk,

   The most challenging factor in Gillman's "The Yellow Wallpaper"  is the narrator's situation. The narrator is a woman having a nervous breakdown, haunted by visions and obsessions.  Forbidden to write, she secretly writes down her thoughts and experiences in an anxious and disjointed way.  Not only is she an unreliable narrator, her reports are complicated further by the un-trusting nature of her husband and his sister, who take care of her.

   The narrator, an intelligent woman treated like a child by her husband, sees a creeping woman in the wallpaper of her room and by the end of the story she identifies with an merges with that creeping woman becoming one.  Possibly a ghost or demon spirit, there are elements of the supernatural with the imprisoning of the narrator's double, a Doppelganger, deciphering in the wallpaper the text of her imprisoned female identity.

   The narrator notes that the patterns in the wallpaper "commit suicide" personifying the wallpaper and beginning her descent into the co-mingling of the spirit with the wallpaper.

   Thoughts of "the baby is well and happy," understanding her  husband's attitude towards her, and "seriously burning down the house," adds to her deep transformation by the end of the story that perhaps not only will she join with the wallpaper but destroy everything in the house leading her own eventual destruction.

   Sources:

   http://etext.virginia.edu/toc/modeng/public/GilYell.html

   http://www.enotes.com/yellow-wallpaper-qn/themes-characters

   http://www.enotes.com/yellow-wallpaper-salem/yellow-wallp...

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   Posted by epollock on Thursday May 14, 2009 at 4:33 PM