Response to Charlotte Perkins Gilman's "The Yellow Wall-Paper"

Spooky. This was a most odious piece to read. Gilman totally captured the slow deterioration of a mind slipping into insanity. "The Yellow Wall-Paper" opens with the main character, a women suffering from what appears to be postpartum depression, or at least just extreme anxiety, explaining in the first person, as if she were writing in a journal, to the reader how she and her husband "John," whose a doctor, just moved into a large estate for three weeks, so she can recover. Apparently, Dr. John believes that the best thing for his wife is solitude and seclusion, away from the outside world.

However the case, this totally turns out to be a bad call, as it leaves the writer (who also isn't supposed to write--another part of her husband's prescription) no choice but to live inside--inside the world of herself, which turns out to be most detrimental to her health and mental well-being. Over the course of the piece, divided up into journal entries that supposedly the woman writes while no one is watching, she falls deeper and deeper inside herself, into her obsession with the grotesque wall-paper plastered on the walls of her cell-like bedroom, until, at the story's horrific conclusion she completely looses her mind to it.

In class, a few people made the point that in a way, in her own way, lacking control of her life and her situation, she takes control and escapes with it in the only way she can in a sort of bleak take on freedom. However the case, after reading it, I walked away with the opposite impression--loosing her mind wasn't an extreme case of freedom; it was actually an extreme case of oppression. The poor woman wasn't at last escaping her situation, she was locking herself into it forever. Yeah, definitely a most odious piece to read for sure.