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The Ending Of The Yellow Wallpaper

Decent Essays

The endings of many short stories are left ambiguous. Among these works of “The Yellow Wallpaper,” which has an ending that leaves the reader questioning the sanity of the main character, Jane. Some, however, argue that the narrator is haunted by supernatural forces. Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s main purpose in writing “The Yellow Wallpaper” is to show how clear that Jane is trapped in a room to become mentally unstable. It is clear that Jane is insane based on the bars of the wallpaper’s pattern fragmenting her identity, internalizing the conflict she experiences and eventually leading to the complete breakdown of the boundaries of her identity and that of her projected shadow. Constantly alone and forbidden to leave her bedroom, the lack of something causes the protagonist to become delusional to occupy her time. The room is much like her prison with “barred windows for little children and rings and things in the walls.” (Gilman 648) Even the pattern on the wallpaper was at first completely random. As if she was caged, “at night in any kind of light, in twilight, candlelight, lamplight, and worst of all by moonlight, it becomes bars!” (Gilman 653) She refers to …show more content…

This woman is simply a “formless figure sulking about behind the silly and conspicuous front design,” that all objects possess much like the blurred shadow at first. (Gilman 650) The fact that the figure is at first “formless” suggests that there is a definite evolution of this being, since eventually she claims to clearly see a woman; describing the wall as “silly and conspicuous” hints to the pattern being something very loud and noticeable...but not threatening. This also changes when the wallpaper seems to plague her by the end of the story. Therefore, something that seems to happen slowly is her eventual personality as her isolation in the room takes hold of her

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