Lit & Civ: The Yellow Wall-Paper

I have always adored "The Yellow Wall-Paper" by Charlotte Perkins Gilman. I first read this six thousand-word short-story in high school a few days before Halloween as part of our Ghost Story week. The interpretation of the story is apparently what stuck in my mind, because I was quite surprised to re-read it and discover a key fact missing: I was taught that the yellow wall-paper was the narrator's skin!

*pauses for reaction*

Doesn't that interpretation make the story a million times creepier? The mental image of her husband walking in to find her bloody, mangled self, totally unaware that she had just peeled off her own skin instead of the "wall-paper" she so hated. Grosssssss. I could have sworn that it was an explicit part of the story, but alas, the story ends with her husband fainting.

I then googled "The Yellow Wall-paper" to read some interpretations and was dismayed that I found none claiming that the wallpaper was her skin. Was my high school teacher wrong? Whatever. I like that interpretation and I'm stickin' with it!

But that wasn't the only reason I liked this short story so much then and now. I love how easy it is to read the narrator's mental decline to insanity. You can pinpoint exactly where she snapped: one minute she's worried about what her husband thinks and by the next entry, all is well and she's fine! She's not fine. But crazy people never know they're crazy!

I also love the self-denial in this piece. The narrator believes that her husband loves her and spends time with her, but I think he never saw her until the end of the story. Several times she mentions her "imagination;" I think she imagined that her husband cared enough to see her, when really, he locked her in a room because she scared him and he didn't want to deal with him. That's my take anyway.

All in all, I think this is a fantastic piece. It's an easy read showing the woe-some ways of past recovery techniques. Now we can see how ridiculous it is to put a mentally unstable person in a room by herself for months without anything to occupy her. It would drive anyone crazy! And that was precisely Gilman's point.