Creative Writing: The Yellow Wallpaper

“No I am perfectly fine thanks. But really I was in the upstairs room of the building you know and there was a mirror and a monster and…”

You think you have mastered it, but just as you get well underway in following, it turns a back-somersault and there you are. It slaps you in the face, knocks you down, and tramples upon you. It is like a bad dream (Gilman 12). The narrator strongly resists the wallpaper because it constantly forces its ugliness upon her mind. The paper serves as an unattractive, unresolved and complex symbol throughout the story. “The female lineage that the wallpaper represents is thick, with life, expression, and suffering (Treichler 193).

Seeing as there was nowhere else to go, you shuffled over to the opening and frowned. It was dark and you could just barely make out a doorway to what was most likely another room. What really threw you off guard was how nicely the doorway was carved. An intricate pattern wove itself around the exit. Did that mean… someone else was here? At the thought of possibly being able to get out of here with the help of another person made you scurry over to the patterned doorway with little hesitation. The sleeves of your two-sizes-too-big sweater fell down to wrap loosely around your forearms when you reach over and grabbed the wall to peak around into the next area.

From the beginning of their tenure in the summer home, the narrator’s fixation on the wallpaper in her quarters is ever present. She states that it is the worst paper she had ever seen. It is dull with a vague pattern that follows no rules of how it is laid out. The color is “almost revolting; a smoldering unclean yellow, strangely faded by the slow-turning sunlight’” (Gilman)

The wallpaper is "repellent, almost revolting; a smouldering unclean yellow strangely faded by the slow-turning sunlight" (132). To add to the grotesqueness of the color, the paper was unkept and peeled "in great patches all around the head of [her] bed" (131). It had a pattern that was a flamboyant and through the progression of the story, the protagonist starts to see a woman that seems to be trapped behind

Footsteps started towards his door from the dark corridor outside it. Slow, steady, purposeful footsteps, edging ever closer to his lonely, dark room. David reached above his head and turned his gas lamp up, so that it lit the room with flickering orange, creating strange shadows that danced on the walls like a five-year olds nightmare.

The room was filled with a deep, deafening unbroken silence for many minutes after, nobody moved, or even dared to utter a single noise. We heard the crashing noise of many supports and other structures falling from their support and as I moved towards the entrance, trying to open the door, it wouldn’t move an inch, clearly having been blocked by a pillar of wood and stone.

Gwaine, his eyes glassy and confused from too little sleep, sat up like a shot. “What’s happening? Any word?”

When they reached the top of the stairs, there were three doors- one to each side and one at the end of the short hallway. Opening the door on the right, they entered a dimly lit bedroom. The scent of well-oiled leather and pipe tobacco greeted them. A tall, ornately carved mahogany bed centered two windows- a large, plush, dark green and burgundy floral rug covered the floor. A night table graced each side of the bed; a dresser sat against the wall opposite the bed. In one corner, a royal blue waistcoat draped a chair back. A pair of leather riding boots sat beside it. Thomas walked over to the window to look out- it faced a marsh to the north and if you looked far right, you could see a little of the coastline

The escalation of the unknown sounds grew to be too distressing for John and Margaret when one night they were jarred awake by an unseen force. They felt the floorboards moving beneath their feet, along with unknown knocking sounds. The noises persisted until they finally fell asleep from exhaustion. Fatigued from these disturbances, they woke the next morning wanting answers.

Wallpaper, in general, is never appealing, but usually most wallpaper does not make one go completely crazy and lose their mind. Charlotte Perkins Gilman, the author of “The Yellow Wallpaper, created a wallpaper that did just that. “The Yellow Wallpaper” is a short story about a husband and wife, who go to a summer house for the wife’s depression. John, the husband, is a doctor and is responsible for treating his wife. His treatment for her illness is to keep her cooped up in an old nursery room with hideous yellow wallpaper.

and it closed softly behind me, the blades snick-ing back into their places and the alarm re-engaging behind my back. I looked around, keeping perfectly still with my body pressed into the shadows against the door, my eyes narrowed and my breath coming and going silently through my mouth. The room was bare except for a white block about the size of a

“What happened?” I whispered, I could barely talk my throat was dry as the desert,” where am I?”

“Magnus, are you okay?” They were unfamiliar, but it sounded as if they were panicking. He inclined his head in the direction was coming from and opened his mouth to say something before the world became, once again, dark and silent.

I wake up to the sound of pounding steps running down the hallway. I get up, opening the door as I rub my eyes. "What's going on?" I mumble yawning from exhaustion. "Eliza!" A small voice calls out to me from downstairs. Suddenly I'm being pulled by the small boy through the hall.