I have chosen to do my analysis on The Yellow Wallpaper, by Charlotte Perkins Gilman. I am going to be using the readers response critical lens in my analysis of this short story. I am going to start out by saying that this story is very creepy, however it is beautifully written, and I was very much drawn into the story, close to becoming possessed by it. The protagonist of the story is a woman who is married to a physician named John. Her name is not stated, neither is Johns last name, however they are indeed married and have a maid named Jennie. I believe the protagonist name in this short story is intentionally left anonymous to allow the reader to believe that it could be anyone. The name John is also a very common name, and might serve in the same sense of anonymity to represent any physician.
The rising action of the short story is the protagonists growing curiosity of the yellow wallpaper she is surrounded by in her room. It seems that the more time she is left to her thoughts, the closer she gets to reaching a breaking point of insanity. The story starts out innocently enough, where John believes she is suffering from nervous depression, and rents out a colonial mansion for her to receive rest and to not be distracted. He advices her not to think about her condition, and so she begins to think about the house. This is what gives root to her insanity. She is stuck in this room with yellow wallpaper that she hates, and becomes obsessed by the task of trying to figure out its pattern. This story sort of terrified me, I too spend a lot of time alone, and feel like I become obsessed by a repetitive notions at times. I luckily don't have any wallpaper in my room. I realized she was really going nuts when she believed she discovered that there was a woman shaking the pattern behind the wall, and that the pattern held her in the wall. She believes the woman gets out in the daytime, and is then confined to the wall at night behind the pattern.
The climatic moment of the story has to be when John opens the door to the room and sees that she has torn down the wallpaper, and is creeping on the across the floor. "I kept on creeping just the same, but I looked at him over my shoulder. '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!'" The way she uses the word creep is fantastic. Upon first reading her use of the word creeping, I imagined the woman she described seeing outside as walking around with hunched shoulders. I imagined creeping to mean that she was walking around mysteriously as if she knew she was somewhere she wasn't allowed to be. However I looked up the word and realized its meaning was much more horrifying. Creeping means to move around on the ground slowly using your hands and knees, like an animal or creature. This made the story even more terrifying for me. I think my imagination of what the protagonist is seeing is more terrifying than any horror movie I've seen in the past. The human imagination is much more terrifying that anything that could be captured on film. It kind of reminded me of the movie The Ring.
I read the authors reason to writing this story, and she confessed to going through a similar episode! She said that there was a physician that advised her to remain unproductive, and un-stimulated until she got better. She however, felt that she was going mad, and took the advice of a friend to go back to being productive, so she started writing. Having something to do is what ended up saving her from losing it, this is what inspired her to write The Yellow Wallpaper.
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