He will, unfortunately, turn out to be dead wrong about that. John is an ordinary husband. He expects a wife of the times, when what he has instead is a flighty, intellectual, easily bored companion who craves his respect. As the story goes on, John increasingly spends days and even nights away from home. After spending much of the story begging to have her opinions heard, our protagonist finally gives her husband up for lost, and turns her full attention to the mystery of the wallpaper.
John is so pleased to see me improve! And no wonder he would thinks so; he has no respect for her interiority. Still, he does love her, and puts these strictures on his wife out of love, erroneously thinking that he can make her be exactly what he wants without destroying her utterly.
Presumably, Mary is a wet nurse for the infant. This short story written in first person narration becomes her journal in which she can express herself, however her constant battle to hide her writing results in a lack of self-expression which only exacerbates her illness, as her husband slowly takes away from her everything that makes her an individual creative person.
Her husband also ensures that she has no physical or mental stimulation and is to see no company that could induce this stimulation. As a result of his controlling behaviour she transfers her creative expression from writing, to the wallpaper. Through out the novella the narrators madness gets progressively worse, her tone and style of writing deteriorates through out reflecting her increasingly erratic mind.
Notice these changes in the extracts shown below, taken from different sections of the text. At the beginning of the story, she describes her hatred for the paper.
However you can still see her ability for story making as she describes the pattern as having eyes, an early indication of her hallucinations:. Up and down and sideways they crawl, and those absurd, unblinking eyes are everywhere. In the middle of the story, her fascination with the paper increases, as does her madness. Notice how the narrator is beginning to get attached and possessive about the paper. Her sentences also start to deteriorate, indicated by the shorter sentences, speeding up the pace:.
Behind that outside pattern the dim shapes get clearer everyday. It is always the same shape, only very numerous. And it is like a woman stooping down and creeping about behind the pattern. Towards the end of the story, her sentence structures completely deteriorate. There are also frequent allusions to suicide and violence, for instance she seriously considers burning the house down and her hallucinations also worsen.
I must not let her find me writing. She is a perfect and enthusiastic housekeeper, and hopes for no better profession. I verily believe she thinks it is the writing which makes me sick! John thought it might do me good to see a little company, so we just had mother and Nellie and the children down for a week. Jennie sees to everything now. I caught Jennie with her hand on it once. I heard him ask Jennie a lot of professional questions about me.
She eventually sees a woman, and later, she sees the woman moving. She describes the woman as crawling around quickly behind the paper and shaking it. What does John represent in the Yellow Wallpaper? John Is a Prison Guard '' The narrator's windows have bars, and the narrator believes that a woman in the wallpaper pattern is also shaking its imprisoning bars.
She comes to identify with this woman, believing that she herself has escaped from the wallpaper. Is John the antagonist in the Yellow Wallpaper? John, Jane's husband, is the antagonist. He always tells Jane what to do. He tells her what medicine to take, who she can and can't hangout with, where she can sleep, and whether her health is improving or not.
What does the bed symbolize in the Yellow Wallpaper? The bed can also represent intimacy and is hence used as a repressive measure and further sexual dominance, here Gilman has used the bed as a form of control and John too uses this control to aid his wife to conform to an idealistic wife and mother.
What does the ending of the story suggest about the woman behind the wallpaper? The woman behind the yellow wallpaper represents the narrator's repressed life and is a manifestation of her mental illness, which is a result of her postpartum depression and the "rest cure" that her husband subscribes to.
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