Examining the world of The Yellow Wallpaper

When reading "The Yellow Wallpaper" by Charlotte Gilman, I seemed to have entered a very perplexing mind. The narration that occurred in this story was first person, which gave us a detailed, yet very burying experience about what the narrator felt through out the whole story.

When I started reading the story, I visualized a woman that wasn't so ill minded, but just a woman that was depressed due to hormonal imbalances in her body. Her husband, who we know to be a physician, is taking her case and finding ways to improve her health. Due to his profession, he doesn't see his wife as a wife, but only a mere patient. Also, as the story carries on, we notice that he puts her in a "crazy-person" room which, as a result, keeps her away from the public eye as well as hidden from the people that know her husband really well. Therefore, by treating her as a patient as well as a type of problem that can hinder his reputation, we see the effects of these decisions affect the narrator greatly.

At first we see her emotional imbalanced and she goes on in great detail explaining how they (husband and family) have put her in a room that isn't well suited for her (of course it is not suited for her; she's not insane at that moment, just depressed!). She goes on complaining how the yellow wallpaper of her room is a very uncomfortable presence to her. She goes on in details how this wallpaper won't let her concentrate on anything else. In her descriptions, she explains that her complaining about the paper to her husband doesn't do her any good. She gets rejected of her wishes and is asked by her husband to rest, instead and deal with the yellow wallpaper.
We see that, due to her lack of control for herself and for her common rejections by her husband, she loses a bit of her own reality.

Through her personal writings and by witnessing not what the outside characters perceive, but what the narrator personally thinks, we get a personal insight to what is truly going on. We see that she is treated unfairly, and we also see how this unfairness affects her mind. We witness her go from slightly ill, to incredibly crazy in the end.

She focuses her time, as we read one, on that bewildering yellow paper. By being trapped and not having the means of communicating with the outside world, we see her world dwindling. This dwindling process makes her create her own little world inside that room to give her a slight view of reality, which is truths is just a mental problem that she is causing for herself. By making her own little world, she starts to see things. She complains about a woman that is creeping about her room and around the house, which gives an insight that it isn't' a woman, but her, possibly desiring to be like the woman. This gives the reader a kind of creepy insight because we see her process of insanity little by little, day by day. It is very frightening, as well as mystifying how her thoughts go from normal, to a bit out of touch with normality.

Through reading this story, I experience a sense of understanding. More than usual due to the process the narrator took. We have sympathy, yet a bit of creepiness due to how she ends up turning up in the end. The way this story was made, we get to have a certain connection; a personal bond with the narrator. We can understand well enough to know why things resulted because we saw many of the steps it took to get the character to her state. We also understand that nothing of what resulted was her fault. She was trapped, and by this resulted her to question reality to the point of loosing touch with it completely.