In beginning to read this short story, I felt as if the author was going to show us the actuality of how the house she was to stay in was haunted. Instead, the reader is shown a symbol, the wallpaper in the nursery, and the narrator slowly slips into insanity due to it. Personally, I became captivated by the tale of the narrator and her struggle with finding the woman trapped within the confines of the wallpaper, and at some points was reminded of myself as a child, looking for faces in the inanimate objects around me. Children begin finding faces in inanimate objects at infancy because of the region on the human brain that develops early for facial perception and recognition, our narrator even hints at this."I remember what a kindly wink the knobs of our big, old bureau used to have, and there was one chair that always seemed like a strong friend . . . I could always
hop into that chair and feel safe"
Even though the entire story reads to her insanity, I believe it reads to all women of the time period that Gilman lived in. All of female-kind was suppressed and oppressed. I feel that the woman in the wallpaper that the narrator saw, and in the end, identified as herself, represented all of the women in the late 1800s and early 1900s. ""I've got out at last," said I, "in spite of you and Jane! And I've pulled off most of the paper, so you can't put me back!"" They were trapped in a world of decaying, but sickly elegance that locked them, never to let them out. If a women escaped from it, even through insanity, she struggled as much as she could to stay as far away from that world as she could.
The Victorian Era, or as some call it, the Guilded Age, was a very new age for women due to women's rights activism being openly started in the late 1840s. Charlotte Perkins Gilman was a huge advocate for the rights of women. She was quoted saying things such as: "Until 'mothers' earn their livings, 'women' will not," and "There is no 'fe
male mind." The brain is not an organ of sex. Might as well speak of a 'female liver."
The story itself is filled with hints of her silence as
a female.
"There comes John, and I must put this away, --he hates to have me write a word."
"...I take pains to control myself--before him at least, and that makes me very tired."
"I do not know why I should write this. I don't want to. I don't feel able. And I know John would think it absurd. But I must say what I feel and think in some way--it is such a relief!"
The story even implies that she is kept in a more secluded and secure area by her husband against her will. As the architecture of the
house goes up in height, the security level does so as well. The text says that the windows are barred and the room that she stays in is an old childrens' nursery. John seems to lock his wife away in a prison for children. He also treats her as a child. When she says that she feels a ghostly chill about the house, "...but he said what I felt is a draught, and [he] shut the window."
I believe that in many ways, Charlotte Perkins Gilman was attempting to show the world, not only how dangerous rest treatment can be for humankind, but also how women suffer at the hands of men who believe they are above their wives.
I thoroughly enjoyed this story and personally, I strongly believe it is essential to the reading list for this class.
