Quotes Yellow Wallpaper

If a physician of high standing, and ones own husband, assures friends and relatives that there is really nothing to matter with one but temporary nervous depression a slight hysterical tendency what is one to do? So I take phosphates or phosphiteswhichever it is, and tonics, and journeys, and air, and exercise, and am absolutely forbidden to work until I am well again. Personally, I disagree with their ideas . . .

Explanation

Main elements of the narrators dilemma are present. The confusion over phosphates or phosphites is in character for someone who is not particularly interested in factual accuracy. The choppy rhythm of the sentences, often broken into one-line paragraphs, helps evoke the hurried writing of the narrator in her secret journal, as well as the agitated state of her mind.

I sometimes fancy that in my condition if I had less opposition and more society and stimulusbut John says the very worst thing I can do is think about my condition, and I confess it always makes me feel bad. So I will let it alone and talk about the house.

Explanation Notably, the narrator interrupts her own train of thought by recalling Johns instructions. Gilman
shows how the narrator has internalized her husbands authority to the point that she practically hears his voice in her head, telling her what to think.

This mental struggle, this desperate attempt not to think about her unhappiness, makes her project her feelings onto her surroundings, especially the wallpaper, which becomes a symbolic image of her condition. Gilmans consistent use of irony throughout the story. She feels bad whenever she thinks about her condition, that is, about both her depression and her condition in general within her oppressive marriage.

There are things in that paper which nobody knows but me, or ever will. Behind that outside pattern the dim shapes get clearer every day. It is always the same shape, only very numerous. And it is like a woman stooping down and creeping about behind that pattern. I dont like it a bit. I wonderI begin to thinkI wish John would take me away from here!

Explanation Notably, the narrator interrupts her own train of thought by recalling Johns instructions. Gilman
shows how the narrator has internalized her husbands authority to the point that she practically hears his voice in her head, telling her what to think.

This mental struggle, this desperate attempt not to think about her unhappiness, makes her project her feelings onto her surroundings, especially the wallpaper, which becomes a symbolic image of her condition. Gilmans consistent use of irony throughout the story. She feels bad whenever she thinks about her condition, that is, about both her depression and her condition in general within her oppressive marriage.

Life is very much more exciting now than it used to be.

Explanation

This comment comes just after the scene in which the narrator catches Jennie touching the paper and resolves that no one else is allowed to figure out the pattern. Now that the narrator has become hopelessly obsessed with the pattern, spending all day and all night thinking about it, life has become more interesting and she is no longer bored. The comment is funny, but the reader knows that someone who would make such a joke is not well. Indeed, in the section that follows, the narrator casually mentions that she considered burning the house down in order to eliminate the smell of the wallpaper.

I dont like to look out of the windows eventhere are so many of those creeping women, and they creep so fast. I wonder if they all come out of that wall-paper as I did?

Explanation In the storys final scene, just before John finally breaks into her room, the narrator has finished
tearing off enough of the wallpaper that the woman she saw inside is now freeand the two women have become one. This passage is the exact moment of full identification, when the narrator finally makes the connection she has been avoiding, a connection that the reader has made already. The woman behind the pattern was an image of herselfshe has been the one stooping and creeping.

he question she asks is poignant and complex: did they all have to struggle the way I did? Were they trapped within homes that were really prisons? Did they all have to tear their lives up at the roots in order to be free? The narrator, unable to answer these questions, leaves them for another womanor the readerto ponder.