Yellow Wallpaper How the Antagonist in \"The

¶ … Yellow Wallpaper

How the antagonist in "The Yellow Wallpaper" by Charlotte Perkins contributes to the story's overall meaning.

The physician's wife is the main character and has just given birth. She suffers from postpartum depression, but the husband tries his best to treat her. Her husband prescribes a pattern of treatment that requires her to be locked in a bedroom with a yellow paper that is lurid. The main character is a writer who has been forbidden to write; however, she writes when no one is around her. Beautiful grounds surround the estate, but she is motivated to stay indoors and not to give into fancies. She has chosen a bedroom that is darks and decrepit. The floor has scratches and the walls have holes and dents. In addition, the bed has been permanently nailed on the floor.

Some sections of the floor have yellow wallpaper patches that the woman despises. Her husband has remorsefully refuted her numerous requests to leave the house or change the bedroom. The wife's behavior has become more twisted and strange despite her husband's claims that there is an improvement in her health. The wife begins to learn about the patterns in the wallpaper. These patterns change forming face whose eyes are bulging. The faces change and become figure which later forms one woman. Gradually, the physician's wife begins to meeting this creep woman in the bedroom. Without the knowledge of her husband, she is motivated to identify the secrets behind the yellow wallpaper (Gilman 33).

As time passed, the woman developed more tactful ways of hiding her journal: this made her hide her true thoughts from her husband, John. The wife longs for a stimulating activity and company but is not comfortable with her husband's controlling and patronizing nature. She focuses on the wallpaper, which she finds to be ugly, and an odd menace. She complains that her husband has refused to repair the room because she had fixed her mind on the wallpaper. However, her imagination has been aroused. She says that she likes picturing people on the pathways around the house and her husband discourages such fantasies. She reflected on her childhood when she worked alone and imagined terrific things in the dark. She describes the bedroom as a nursery room for kids pointing out that the floor has scratches, the wallpaper is torn, and the heavy furniture has been fixed in their places. She realizes that the wallpaper design has attained a strange pattern, and this interrupts her writing. At this time, John's sister is working for them as a housekeeper (Johnson 18).

Later, the wallpaper dominates imagination of the narrator. The narrator becomes secretive and hides her intentions regarding the wallpaper by ensuring that she finds out about the wallpaper on her own. At some point, John's sister is startled after touching the wallpaper and realizing that it had yellow stains. John mistakes fixation of the narrator for tranquility and he thinks that her health is improving. However, the narrator sleeps less and thinks that she can smell the wallpaper both inside and outside the house. She learns of a strange mark on the wallpaper across the entire room (Gilman 59). This suggests to the narrator that there is a woman trying to get out from the original pattern of the wallpaper. She sees this creeping woman shaking the bars at night and briefly escapes.