The ending of The Yellow Wallpaper. Breakdown or Breakthrough

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‘The Yellow Wallpaper’ is a document of the mental breakdown of a middle class Victorian woman, but beneath this, is the portrayal of her breakthrough that women are being treated as inferior by men, and her discovery in her insane and insecure state of mind, that woman are chained to a patriarchal society where men are the ones who have the majority of the power and control. But to what extent is it a breakthrough rather than breakdown? 

 The narrator’s insanity increases throughout the novel and the reader becomes aware of this by her language; her short and choppy sentences show her agitated state of mind and the fact that she is ‘forbidden to “work” until she is well again’ gives us more of an insight into her illness. The whole story is a record of her descending to insanity and depression, a document of her thought patterns as her mind becomes clouded as her vivid imagination unravels her strange and confused thoughts (or unravels the true allegory of her obsessive examination of the wallpaper). The end is ultimately a culmination of all her insane (yet allegorically relevant) thinking as she tries to find a ‘conclusion’ to the ‘pointless pattern’ that symbolizes the rules of society.

As the story progresses, the mysterious yellow wallpaper becomes mentioned increasingly, and the reader is made aware of how unreliable the narrator actually is in this state of mind as her opinions of the wallpaper change rapidly and not for much reason. The way she projects her feelings onto her surroundings from the start, not necessarily the wallpaper, marks the beginning of her slide into obsession and madness, and the way she prefers the outdoors perhaps conveys her underlying wish for freedom from the restraints of society – ‘There is a delicious garden! I never saw such a garden’. Here Charlotte Perkins Gilman presents the narrator as exceptionally melodramatic by her use of superlatives and seemingly unnecessary speculation of inanimate objects, probably to show her mental instability and the breakdown she is going through that causes her to obsess like this.

At first she describes the wallpaper as 'committing every artistic sin', the colour being 'repellent' and 'sickly sulphur', her first impressions of it as it becomes apparent to her, that it is repulsive and not conforming to ordinary conventions of what ‘art’ is. In the allegorical view of the story (i.e. the breakthrough of the narrator), this could be conveyed as the idea of women not wanting to break free of the chains of the patriarchal society they are living in, instead 'hugging their chains' and conforming to the ordinary patterns of the life they are used to - not committing an 'artistic sin' and rebelling as she feels the wallpaper is doing. In due course, she becomes stronger and more confident in her opinion and ultimately will rebel and break through the wallpaper’s theoretical separation of women and society, for herself at least.

Moreover, the wallpaper seems to represent the thin line separating women from men that holds them back from their true potential and freedom. She mentions at the start that it is ‘pronounced enough to constantly irritate and provoke study’, showing how much it is beginning to affect and interest her – whether it is because of her obsessive insanity and is provoked by her illness, or because of her need of freedom from the chains of society. She then even personifies the wallpaper, saying the ‘lame uncertain curves… suddenly commit suicide’, perhaps conveying the idea that if women do not stick to their role in society, or if they try to understand or ‘follow’ how the bars of patriarchy are restricting them, they will be driven insane enough to want to commit suicide. Her obsession increases a great deal throughout the novel, and as she begins to unravel her idea of what the wallpaper actually is, the extended metaphor of it being this shield protecting women or wall denying them of freedom becomes more and more clear, resulting in her descent into madness or enlightenment.

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Furthermore, her changing perspective of the wallpaper, the confusion surrounding it (‘I’m getting really fond of the room, in spite of the wallpaper, perhaps because of the wallpaper’) and the fact that she ‘will follow the pattern to some sort of conclusion’ ultimately builds up to the state she is in at the end of the novel; on the one hand she is clearly driven to insanity – ‘It is so pleasant to be out in this great room and creep around as I please’, but on the other hand, past her insanity and agitated state of mind, she unravels the deeper ...

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