Yellow Wallpaper Analysis
...as and gives way to irony. The narrator observes bars on the windows, and “rings and things” on the walls, and believes that the room was probably a playroom, and then a gymnasium. The author, however, leaves room for some discrepancy. The room may have been used for darker purposes, such as a room for torture or concealed confinement. It would have been the perfect place to hide somebody away, like a secret, which sheds light on the irony. Perhaps it was used to hide some ancient family's crazy relative. A more plausible use for the room is as a birthing room. Evidence for this is the narrator's description of the bed, that was nailed to the floor, and the wallpaper, that was striped off in patches all around the head of the bed, as far as she could reach. Perhaps the bed was used for delivery. It is ironic that the room may have been used this way, with the yellow wallpaper giving more an atmosphere of death and rotting and "old, foul, bad yellow things" than that of life and birth. This coincides with the ancient myth that from death comes life,but is ironic considering the fact that the narrator was probably recovering from giving childbirth. The author makes a parallel between the room's former use and the narrator's current condition. The room, of course, was not chosen for its wallpaper, or the bars on the windows, but because John thought his wife would recover more rapidly in an airy, sunlit room. First of all, it must be established that John loved his wife. Everything he did, with respect to the narrator, he did because he thought it was best. He choose an old, secluded, and beautiful house for her to rest in, away from any outside exertions, to insure that she would be well again. He choose the biggest room in the house for her so that he could take a bed in the same room in case she needed attention during the night time hours. He did not, however, give her much of a choice. She may have preferred one of the rooms downstairs rather than the room with the horrid yellow wall paper, which he decided to leave hanging even though she hated it. John did not take his wife seriously, as she stated. When she told him that she wished to leave, that things were getting to be too much, he told her that if she was in any danger, he could and would move her, but that "… you really are better, dear, whether you see it or not … ." As far as he knew, she was "better," yet still she suffered, and he did not believe her testimony. He did the best he could to make her well again because he was her husband and he loved her, but he did so as a physician and with the remedies of an incompetent society. His views toward a remedy can be seen as those of society because he is a "physician of high standing," and because he shared the views of his brother-in-law, also a "physician of high standing." When it was finally revealed to him the extent of her condition, he fainted. This shows his, and society's, ignorance toward the narrator's condition. He, although appearing to set up the conditions that caused her condition to worsen, did not cause her illness. Even though he put her in a room that may have been used to torture people, with it's "rings and things" on the walls, he did so with the most innocent intentions. He, because of society, unwittingly imprisoned her within her own psyche because the seriousness of postpartum depression was not realized in the narrator's case. The narrator's case is one that went unrealized by all but her and the reader until the story's conclusion. She probably already had a psychological imbalance long before giving birth, but she could not cope with the depression that followed. She was repressed by her husband and her society into a state of mind pushed to the edge. She had to "creep" around the ...