Winning by Losing

“TheYellow Wallpaper”
By Charlotte Perkins Gilman

Explain the relationship between the narrator and her husband, John. How does this relationship affect the narrator?

In Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper”, the narrator tells us about a woman who goes into a rest cure as prescribed by her husband John, a physician. Her relationship with John is almost an endurance of un-being. She is not supposed to express herself in any form. Throughout the story, the narrator pauses by hiding her notebook from her husband. The rest cure as applied here is worse than the illness and brings about her descend into madness. The confinement of her body wouldn’t be as bad if it didn’t go hand in hand with the confinement of her mind.

She is supposed to give into her husband unquestionably, but even as she knows she is not supposed to speak up she does it throughout and usually ends in her breakdowns. It’s incredible but, as she is getting crazier she is feeling better in mind and her husband agrees that she is getting better in body. Towards the end of the story the narrator “escapes”, and she lets us know that there is no going back "I've got out at last, in spite of you and Jane? And I've pulled off most of the paper, so you can't put me back!" The paper here seems to be an allegory of the life she left behind, destroying it by going crazy.  And she doesn’t just escape, the coup the grâce is a last act of defiance, she lets him know he is in her way with the last line of  “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!" The very end is my favorite part!