Tyoun Shuford

                                                        2-2-14

                                  The yellow wallpaper

            The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman was written in a time when women didn't have as many rights as men and when men basically controlled them. So this shows the theme of the story is what can happen when men  isolate, and try to control Women like John did his Wife in this short story.

            In the begging of the story John takes his wife to a isolate house for a "summer vacation". His wife describes it as a "haunted house" and automatically assumes something is wrong. If someone were to put you in a abandoned house and told you you couldn't come out your room you would start feeling some of the emotions she did such as that John is very Controlling and how he discourages her imagination. This seems like John is treating her as if she was a child not as his wife and this is the start of her depression into insanity.

          John belittles his wife's intelligence not just by putting her in a nursery he puts her in a nursery that is described as for little kids. His wife points out that paper is torn off the wall and has starches and gouges on the floor and at one point even calls her little girl in the story. While being locked in her room she becomes very fixated with this yellow wallpaper and think that the woman inside of the it is trapped but what she doesn't know is that the women inside of the wallpaper is her. To me this is the start of her insanity that her husband John has drove her into. 

           By the end of the story John belittled and isolated his wife so far into insanity that she is hopeless and is convinced to see many women in the wallpaper instead of herself. He's wife is so insane that she suspects that John and his sister Jane are aware of her obsession of the wallpaper and she is going to free the woman that is trapped inside. While the wife is attempting to free the women trapped inside the yellow wallpaper her husband breaks into the room and is so shocked to see how insane he has turned his wife he faints.

        Therefore this classic short story about John and his wife written by Charlotte Perkins Gilman supports my theme of that by isolating, belittling, and controlling a women may drive her into a complete stage of insanity.