The Controlling Husband

The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins was a very chilling story. We have another gothic story where the characters are isolated, and due to the isolation the characters begin to change. They are alone in a house, which has been empty for years. Which can raise questions as to why the house was alone for so many years. Although the narrator had her husband’s sister for company, she is not given the company that she truly wants (she begs for her own family but is denied their company). In my opinion I believe that John should not have kept his wife locked away in the ways that he did. It just seemed very odd, to keep her locked away in a house with barred windows and refusing her any socialization with other people. He was a very controlling man and couldn’t even change the wallpaper as the narrator had suggested, to help her cope with their current living situation. He just came up with excuses time and time again, and refused her from anything that she wanted. At a certain point he refers to her as “little girl” which really didn’t sit well with me, he just didn’t seem as this loving husband that the narrator set him up to be. For the three months that she was imprisoned in the house she began to hallucinate and see a woman trapped inside the yellow wallpaper that she hated. She ends up going mad and tries to release the woman that’s inside of the wallpaper, which we later find out symbolizes herself. The woman trapped inside the wallpaper was trying to escape from the yellow wallpaper, just as much as the narrator wanted to escape from the dreadful house.