"The Yellow Wallpaper"

"The Yellow Wallpaper," by Charlette Perkins Gilman was to me a sad story of a woman trapped inside her own home. She seemed to be severely depressed and no one could figure out why. Her husband continually tells her that there is nothing wrong with her and no one can fix it but herself. She speaks of how her, "Nervous troubles are dreadfully depressing" (Gilman 489). Throughout the story I was trying to figure it exactly what is wrong with the narrator. There are many times when she calls her problem a "nervous condition." I tried to come up with a couple of possibilities for why she may be feeling so depressed, left feeling trapped with only the yellow wallpaper acting as almost a character in the story. The narrator speaks about recently having a baby and says that she wishes she can be with him, saying, "And yet, I can not be with him, it makes me so nervous"(Gilman 489). I wondered if maybe she was suffering from post pardom depression which was making her act the way she is. The narrator says she, "Cries at nothing, and cry most of the time" (Gilman 491). The narrator also mentioned that she only cries when she is alone, which means that she is trying to hide her sadness from her husband and anyone else around her, leading them to believe there is really nothing wrong with her. I also felt that her husband, John, seemed to treat her as if she is a child. When the narrator woke him up to talk one night he said to her, "What is it little girl?" (Gilman 493). I took that statement as if John might not treat his wife with respect, he treats her as if she is a child. He may even feel that she is making up that there is something really wrong with her. She pleads to John that she is not getting any better and his response is simply, "Bless her little heart!" (Gilman 493). I think her husbands treatment of her played some sort of role in whatever condition she had. Lastly, I desperately wanted to know what the significance of the Yellow Wallpaper is. I think it has many meanings, and I plan on reading the story over to see if there was anything I missed regarding both the color yellow and the wallpaper itself. Before reading the story, I tried to think of all the things that I associate with the color yellow. My room is yellow, I thought of the sun, and mostly all things that certainly would not lead anyone to be depressed. After reading the story, for some reason I had the vision that yellow could somehow be a depressing color depending on how you look at it. I thought of jaundice, which is a yellow condition of the skin, and wondered if that had any connection to the story, although I did not see it included in it. I also wondered why Gilman decided to base a story around a woman who felt trapped in a room of wallpaper. What does wallpaper itself symbolize? Having recently stripped wallpaper with my mother, since my father did not know how to do it, I began wondering if it is a "women's job?" Did the narrator feel trapped inside a feminine room? Maybe she felt trapped inside her marriage, which is symbolized in the room she was in. The story left me with many questions, and I think I will read it again for hints into why the narrator was feeling the was she was.