Reflection on "The Yellow Wallpaper" by Charlotte Perkins Gilman

   In “The Yellow Wallpaper” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman we read the writings of a women who is put into confinement for an entire summer.  As the story progresses, the speaker slowly loses her mind and becomes insane.  I found this transformation of mind very disturbing and eerily relatable. 

   I have memories of seeing at a pattern or picture that put me in somewhat of a trance when looking deeply at the intricacies.  Some patterns become an optical illusion that trick the mind in seeing things that are actually absent from reality.  Even the speaker has the idea that she is the only one who sees her visions.  It seems as if the speaker sees the pattern moving and reshaping before her eyes and in different lights.  If a person looks at tiles on a bathroom floor or at the small patterns on some furniture, it is very possible to see, often with tired eyes, the pattern morphing into something different then originally seen.  I found that the descriptions of the wallpaper mirrored this.  The shifting pattern on the yellow wallpaper contributes to her decline to madness.

   I believe that almost everyone has had a taste of the madness that creeps into ones mind when placed alone for a period of time.  To imagine the kind of confinement that the speaker was subjected to for the length of a season, especially during summer when there seems to be no end of activity, is a frightening thought.  Being alone with ones thoughts can cause a person to lose the sense of reality much like the speaker in the short story.  The madness seems to take a hold of the speakers mind very similar to how the “woman” would creep around behind the wallpaper.  Each entry of her writing takes on a new level of paranoia and madness as her time in confinement progresses.  The reader can truly sense a shift in the speaker’s mind when she claims that her reflection in the window is really the “woman” behind the wallpaper.  The length of time that the speaker was confined in her room greatly contributes to her insanity.

  Gilman’s short story accurately predicts how a person, when left by themselves, can lose their mind to madness.