Jane Doe
Professor Martin
ENGL 1302
4 May 2004
An Unusual Ending to “The Yellow Wallpaper”
In Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s short story, “The Yellow Wallpaper,” the author presents the poignant and tragic story of a woman beset by post-partum depression after the birth of a child, struggling to become well again against the well-intentioned but ultimately destructive efforts of her physician husband to heal her.  Beyond the obvious feminist overtones of the story, which underscore the traditional roles of males and females in the marriage relationship at the turn of the century, Gilman also uses a clever literary technique to dramatize the protagonist’s mental decline.  Jane’s descent into madness is mirrored by the author’s gradual personification of the wallpaper from an inanimate object into a woman—a woman whose “imprisonment” in the pattern of the wallpaper mirrors Jane’s own incarceration in the dual prisons of the nursery and her own mind.  In struggling to “free” the woman, Jane also struggles to free herself from her own mental imprisonment, until both of them break free and become one in the moment of Jane’s implied suicide.
The narrator, whom we later learn is called Jane, is suffering from what her husband calls “temporary nervous depression—a slight hysterical tendency” and has been “forbidden to ‘work’” until she is well again.  Her husband has taken her away to an isolated estate that is removed from the road, about three miles from nearest town or village.  In an effort to help her recovery by keeping Jane quiet and calm, her well-meaning husband keeps her in an upstairs room in the house, well away from any distraction, but also far removed from much human contact.  We quickly learn, however, that although Jane respects her husband's intentions to help her, she is quite unhappy about being locked away in the dreariest, loneliest room in the house, closed off from the rest of the house by a forbidding gate at the top of the stairs.  “I wanted one downstairs that opened on the piazza and had roses all over the window, and such a pretty old-fashioned chintz hangings! but John would not hear of it”(Gilman 1151).
Jane is particularly fascinated from the very beginning by the décor of the room.  The room is called a "nursery," but it certainly does not look like one to her eye.  “I never saw such ravages as the children have made here,” she says, giving an early indication that perhaps Jane has her own doubts about whether the room was formerly occupied by children. (Gilman 1151)  She notes how the wallpaper is oddly peeled “about as far as I can reach,” looking more like something an insane person would do rather than the young boys who supposedly occupied the room before.   The bed is nailed down, the windows are barred, and there are “rings and things in the walls.”  Why is this?  And why the gate at the head of the stairs?  All these clues are designed to create the impression in the mind of the reader that perhaps an insane person was kept in the room before.  “[Jane] says, for instance, that there is ‘something strange’ about the house they have rented, but her descriptions reveals bit by bit a room that has apparently been used to confine violent mental cases, with bars on the windows, a gate at the top of the stairs, steel rings on the walls, a nailed-down bedstead, and a floor that has been scratched and gouged” (Shumaker 593-594).
But of course it is the wallpaper that becomes the most singular element of the room, at least for Jane.  Her initial description of the paper is, on the surface, merely a commentary on the dreariness of her surroundings:
[…] one of those sprawling flamboyant patterns committing every artistic sin.
It is dull enough to confuse the eye in following, pronounced enough to constantly irritate and provoke study, and when you follow the lame uncertain curves for a little distance they suddenly commit suicide—plunge off at outrageous angles, destroy themselves in unheard of contradictions.
The color is repellant, almost revolting; a smouldering unclean yellow, strangely faded by the slow-turning sunlight.
It is a dull yet lurid orange in some places, a sickly sulphur tint in others. (1152)

But even here, there are the beginnings of a fascination with the wallpaper that clearly goes beyond a mere interest in design or decoration.  We note how Jane describes the pattern as committing “suicide” in some places, clearly a curious thing to say about a wallpaper pattern, but giving us a clue that Jane is beginning to think of the wallpaper in more human terms while also speaking volumes about Jane’s own mental state.  Her fixation on the yellow color, which she calls both “lurid” and “sickly,” is also significant, since yellow is symbolic of illness.  Of course an inanimate object such as wallpaper cannot be “sick,” but the choice of adjectives gives another early clue that Jane is beginning to think of the wallpaper in not merely inanimate terms. 
We gradually learn that Jane is basically imprisoned in the room; although she would like to leave it, her physician husband believes that her continued confinement is critical to her recovery.  This imprisonment is an important concept because Jane is not only imprisoned in the room, she is also imprisoned in—and by—her own mind.  While she longs for companionship, her thoughts quickly revert back to the wallpaper, with its “recurrent spot where the pattern lolls like a broken neck and two bulbous eyes stare at you upside down” ”(Gilman 1153).  She begins to get angry about the “impertinence” and “everlastingness” of it.  "Up and down and sideways they crawl, and those absurd, unblinking eyes are everywhere"”(Gilman 1153).  We see how Jane is now adding human characteristics to the wallpaper: the “broken necks,” the “bulbous eyes,” and so forth.  It is especially interesting to note that she has already mentioned the “eyes” three times, perhaps because she is feeling as though she is constantly being watched.  “Under the unerring scrutiny of the ‘two bulbous eyes’ in the yellow wallpaper, the narrator passes through stages from concern to paranoia and, finally, to madness” (Bak 42).
By this point, we also begin to see the foreshadowing of her implied suicide through an image system that the reader is intended, if only subconsciously, to associate with hanging: the "broken necks" and "bulbous eyes" that occur when a person is hanging from a rope.  When she says, “I never saw so much expression in an inanimate thing before, and we all know how much expression they have," she still recognizes that the paper is not human—but it is clear that the wallpaper is undergoing a transition in her mind from inanimate to animate (Gilman 1153). Another example of foreshadowing occurs when she says: “The wall-paper, as I said before, is torn off in spots, and it sticketh closer than a brother—they must have had perseverance as well as hatred” ”(Gilman 1153). Is she beginning to contemplate removing more of the wallpaper, and if so, why?
She also notes that there is a difference between the “front” design or pattern, and it appears as if she is beginning to imagine something behind it.  “It is this sub-pattern, this fear of what lies behind the eyes of the paper, that consumes and ultimately presses her to madness: ‘If only that top pattern could be gotten off from the under one!’” (Bak 43).  Her gradual personification of the wallpaper now begins to crystallize as she begins to see a human form within the pattern:
This wallpaper has a kind of sub-pattern in a different shade, a particularly irritating one, for you can only see it in certain lights, and not clearly then.
But in the places where it isn’t faded and where the sun is just so—I can see a strange, provoking, formless sort of figure, that seems to skulk about behind that silly and conspicuous front design. (1154)

Her obsession with the wallpaper is now changing from anger to an enjoyable fascination, which is shown when she says: “I’m getting really fond of the room in spite of the wallpaper.  Perhaps because of the wallpaper.  It dwells on my mind so!” (Gilman 1154).  She begins to analyze the wallpaper incessantly, constantly examining all aspects of it, diagonally and horizontally, which further confuses her.  “… [And] I determine for the thousandth time that I will follow that pointless pattern to some sort of conclusion” ”(Gilman 1154). Yet the reader sees that this eventually begins to wear her down emotionally when she states, “It is getting to be a great effort for me to think straight” ”(Gilman 1155). Still she struggles to see these new patterns within—and “behind”—the wallpaper: “Behind the outside pattern, the dim shapes get clearer every day” (Gilman 1156).
Gilman continues to use the gradual personification of the wallpaper, from a decorative element into a true character in the story, as a mirror of Jane’s own continuing descent into insanity.  The more delusional and paranoid Jane becomes, the clearer and more animated the “shapes” behind the pattern become.  She sees the figure behind the pattern shake it “as if she wanted to get out”—certainly mirroring Jane’s own desire to escape her dual imprisonment.  During the night, she gets up to touch the pattern to see if it does move and spends hours trying to determine if the movement she sees in the front pattern is indeed mirrored by the “back” pattern or if it moves “separately.” (Gilman 1157). In the light of day, Jane struggles internally to come to terms with what she believes is happening within the wallpaper: that a human figure is beginning to form—a figure who, like Jane, desperately seeks to escape. She describes the pattern as “a constant irritant to the normal mind” and “torturing” and describes the color of the wallpaper as “infuriating.” ”(Gilman 1157). But at last, by the next night, the “woman” behind it is as “plain as can be” (Gilman 1157).
At last the transformation is complete—Jane fully believes that another woman, trapped just as she is, lives behind the paper.  But with the full personification of the wallpaper, Jane’s own journey to insanity is also complete; as the woman gradually takes form and gains identity, Jane simultaneously loses her own identity.  Yet with only two nights left in the house, Jane believes she must do whatever she can to free the woman trapped behind the pattern, act which perhaps she believes would free her as well:
As soon as it was moonlight and that poor thing began to crawl and shake the pattern, I got up and ran to help her.
I pulled and she shook, I shook and she pulled, and before morning we had peeled off yards of that paper.
A strip about as high as my head and half around the room. (1160)

It is clear by this point that Jane is clearly seeking to escape from something other than the room and house, however, for we already know that Jane and her husband are scheduled to leave in only one or two days.  Instead, the prison from which Jane must escape is that of her own mind, from the paranoia and depression that have increasingly gripped her during her confinement.  Fearing that she will be interrupted before her task is completed, Jane locks herself away in the room and throws the key out the window into the garden—careful to note its landing place so she can later tell her husband and allow him back into the room, but only on her terms, when she is ready.  Finally freeing the woman from the wallpaper, Jane responds to her husband’s entreaties to let him in by telling him where the key may be found.  But when he enters the room, it is clear that the “Jane” he knew is no longer there; she has joined with the woman she has liberated:
“I've got out at last," said I, "in spite of you and Jane. And I've pulled off most of the paper, so you can't put me back!"
Now why should that man have fainted? But he did, and right across my path by the wall, so that I had to creep over him every time! (1161)

There is certainly some ambiguity here about what happens to Jane in the last lines of the story.  One interpretation is the literal one: that she simply has descended into madness and is left creeping around the room in circles, just as the woman within the wallpaper crept. Jane has become her, and vice versa.
There are, however, many clues that perhaps Jane has done something more drastic, or at least intends to. Certainly Jane’s comment that she has “a rope up here that even Jennie did not find. If that woman does get out, and tries to get away, I can tie her!” (Gilman 1161).  The rope is merely a continuation of the earlier image system in the wallpaper that evokes the notion of hanging, and if Jane has indeed “become” the woman at the end of the story, then “tying her” would in fact mean tying herself.  Most significantly, Jane’s husband, John, faints when he sees her—not a reaction one would expect from a trained medical man unless he were confronted with a quite horrifying image.  Would just the sight of Jane crawling along the floor be sufficient, or would her trying to hang herself seem a more likely cause of that reaction?  Gilman quite cleverly leaves this point up to the interpretation of the reader.
Certainly there are many elements of “The Yellow Wallpaper” worthy of analysis; for such a short work, it is quite densely written and rewards the reader with layer upon layer of meaning and fluid interpretation.  There are many techniques Gilman could have used to underscore and reveal Jane’s passage from sanity to insanity, but the method she chooses, of gradually personifying the wallpaper in Jane’s mind until it becomes a “real” woman who ultimately merges with Jane, “freeing” them both, is a unique and clever solution to the dramatic problem.  Whether Jane ultimately hangs herself, or merely falls permanently into the abyss of complete madness, the reader is left with no doubt as to the progress of Jane’s mental state throughout the story.  We need only follow the gradual changes within Jane’s description of the wallpaper to precisely understand Jane’s changing mental state in this excellent, compact tale.

Works Cited
Perkins Gilman, Charlotte. “The Yellow Wallpaper.” Making Literature Matter: An Anthology for Readers and Writers. 2nd Edition. Karen S. Henry. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2003. 1150-1161. 
Shumaker, Conrad.  "Too Terribly Good to Be Printed": Charlotte Gilman's "The Yellow Wallpaper.”  American Literature 57  (1985): 588-599.
King, Jeannette, and Pam Morris.  “On Not Reading Between the Lines: Models of Reading in ‘The Yellow Wallpaper.’”  Studies in Short Fiction 26.1 (1989): 23-33.
Bak, John S.  “Escaping the Jaundiced Eye: Foucauldian Panopticism in Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s ‘The Yellow Wallpaper.’”  Studies in Short Fiction 31.1 (1994): 39-46.
Perkins Gilman, Charlotte. “Why I Wrote The Yellow Wallpaper.” Making Literature Matter: An Anthology for Readers and Writers. 2nd Edition. Karen S. Henry. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2003. 1162-1163.