The Crazy, Creepy Story!

When I began the story “The Yellow Wallpaper,” I found the narrator to seem quite normal (perhaps she was prone to a slight nervous condition, how should I know?!) and I thought that the severity and strictness of her husband’s rules were a little much – no company, no activity, etc., nothing but sleeping and eating. Because the character seemed rather normal, I found the story to be rather boring – a rather repetitive, running commentary of all the narrator’s thoughts on basically…nothing, since she is cooped up with nothing to do but write, secretly. Anyways, I was glad to find that the story became increasingly more interesting as I began to realize that the narrator is indeed sick in the mind…crazy, very crazy! I began reading into things she commented on (you can’t always trust a crazy person you know!)… were the knawed corners on the bed really from before, or were they her doing all along? When she commented on getting a rope to capture the woman and a stool to stand on, I wondered if she was going to commit suicide during a crazy hallucination, thinking herself to be the woman that she was trying to catch! This, however, brings me to another question.
Who is the woman behind the bars in the wall, and what is the connection between her and the narrator, and what does this tell us about the narrator? At first, I believed the figure in the wall to be a trick of the wallpaper, a simple abstract shape found within the lines, a being not unlike those that we found in our rooms as children (for me it was a pine tree outside that, in the shadows of the night, looked like a witch and really scared me). However, as I began to realize her craziness, I thought that the woman was definitely a representation of the narrator’s feelings. The woman, being trapped behind bars shows how the narrator is trapped inside this house, and is going increasingly insane because of it! It is expected that the narrator would feel sympathy for this woman since she can relate to her situation, but the narrator displays increasing insanity and hallucinating by claiming to see the creeping woman all around when looking out the windows, and even more so by becoming the creeping lady! Well, finally coming to the conclusion that the creeping lady behind the bars in the wall did not exist and that it was a representation of her feelings (and craziness!) that morphed into a physical reality is what led me to wonder if in her attempts to catch the woman (who was actually herself) with rope, to lasso her with, and a stool, to stand on in order to reach further, was going to end up as a suicide (one which she had no control over, but was the result of “mixed up identities” so to say). I am, however, slightly unsure of what the ending meant (perhaps you talked about it in class, but I was absent that day…and I was sad to miss English!). The narrator says that her husband fainted, but like I said, crazy people can’t always be trusted. I, personally, find it difficult to believe that her husband, being a physician and aware of her condition (even if he did not know how bad it was), would have such a reaction to actually faint, therefore I am not sure what to make of the ending. The only conclusions that I could make were that 1) she brought some kind of harm to him, knocking him out or something, or 2) he fainted from walking in upon a scene that was much more shocking than the narrator has told us (for example, if she were standing on the stool with the rope around her neck)!!!
The scariest, creepiest, and most interesting aspect of the story was definitely having such insight into the mind of a crazy, hallucinating woman! I found it rather eerie to be “reading her thoughts,” to almost be in her mind….scary!!!

Lastly I wanted to say a bit about some of the short story reading that I have done. This past week I read “A View From Castle Rock.” It is the first story that captured my interest from the beginning, part of this may be because the fifth word of the story is “Edinburgh” (one of my favorite places!!! J). It is a very captivating story about a journey to America on a ship, and it explores so many themes and different emotions, etc. that it would present a myriad of topics that one could write about, a few of them being 1) the American dream, 2) the blending of religion and superstition, 3) new versus old times, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera!!! (I won’t write any more now though, because I’ve already written way too much! J)

word count: 814