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This was a homeword assignment from my Intro to Literary Studies. We had to choose a paragraph from Yellow Wallpaper and write a one page analysis of the story. 1-There are things in that paper that nobody knows but me, or ever will. 2-Behind that outside pattern the dim shapes get clearer every day. 3-It is always the same shape, only very numerous. 4-And it is like a woman stooping down and creeping about behind that pattern. I don’t like it a bit. I wonder — I begin to think — I wish John would take me away from here! My Response After studying and obsessing with the yellow wallpaper in a short period of time, she really believes the paper has hidden secrets only she can uncover. What may just be an intricate pattern to others, appears to be more defined than just being an inanimate object. 2The narrator’s close examination of the paper has her thinking that the more she stares and observes it, the more obvious the solution. She conceives there are two patterns, an outside and inside that can be argued as being a symbolic representation of sanity and insanity, which at this point of the story, she is brinking towards the insanity or outside norm.
It could also be seen as metaphoric between her husband’s theory that she isn’t sick, just tired and her fully believing she is sick. Like some believe we will see light at the end of our lives to follow, the narrator is seeing the outside pattern getting clearer each day she examines it. 3Continuing with the theory that she is being more insane than being normal, she can identify with the outside pattern being the same but at the same time, vague. Just like what’s going on inside of her as well as around her, everything seems to being sort of deja vu, but at a closer look, everything’s shifted.
She thinks she has it all figured out and begins to focus on the wallpaper and its own importance in her life. 4Although the narrator wants to have independence from John, their child, and Jennie, but gets paranoid about the wallpaper having human qualities when she is left alone. Who can blame her as she is being oppressed when she makes comments of being ill or her curiosity of the paper itself. Bibliography Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gillman