She takes her entire period of the night watching the paper and her daytime while sleeping.

‘This woman behind is shaking it’ (Charlotte, pp 9).Īs summer approach the end, the woman borrows permission to leave this room but John refuses and warns her not to say a word for the same. Having the only stimuli as the wallpaper, the designs and patterns appears more intriguing such that a woman figure appears in the pattern which makes her conclude that this figure is making effort to escape and creeps behind the bars. As she spends more time in this room, the wallpaper seems to mutate particular in moonlight. She becomes obsessed and describes the room as a nursery which had kids who disliked the wallpaper just like she did. This suggests that she was the one shredding this wallpaper. She gives a description of its pattern as patched and leaves smears of yellow color on clothes and skin of one touching it. The woman devotes her journal entries to giving a description of the wallpaper ‘yellow’ and its smell is ‘breakneck’. By locking her in the room upstairs it shows the husband is oblivious and dictatorial and this worsens her condition ‘John would not listen’ (Charlotte, pp 4). He treats his wife as powerless patient and serves her as a physician.The woman could have a suffering of postpartum psychosis because she had given birth recently. The husband aims to perform therapy to the wife by what is scientific and observable so as to recover from the depression but instead she progress to madness. She claims that the smell of this yellow paper is unpleasant and ultimately imagines that behind the patterns are women who are creeping and believes she is part of them and locks herself in the room refusing to quit when the period of rent is up ‘Outside you crawl on ground where all is green and not yellow unlike here where the floor is smooth, shoulders fit around and its easy to find the way’ (Charlotte, pp 16)

The wallpaper short story