Logan Rosborough
Conference draft
10/25/12
Ms. Harris The two short stories” The Yellow Wallpaper”, and “What the Tapster saw”, are two very unique stories about a man and a women that experiencing a strange change in their life and what they go through mentally and physically. The authors of these short stories write about two totally different subjects, however they share like and unlike qualities. “The Yellow Wallpaper” and “What the Tapster Saw,” Charlotte Perkins Gilman and Ben Okri share similarities and differences: they both address insanity, medicine, and society while taking a different approach with their writing styles.
The Yellow Wallpaper is a very interesting short story, the narrator of the story is a middle age women who is suffering from depression and anxiety. Her husband John, who is also her doctor, arranged for them to move to a new house for a few months so she can completely focus on getting better. The narrator describes the new house to be interesting and hopes that there are deep secrets within the mansion. She seems to be very happy about the move though, “The most Beautiful place, there are hedges and walls and gates that lock, and lots of separate little house and a delicious garden” (Charlotte). The room John chooses is upstairs away from everything with an asylum like atmosphere. The bed is nailed to the ground with barred in windows. The room sound it was once used for an unstable handicapped person, could also be a reason why John choose that room. She’s completely delusional about the room, believing it was once a play room for little children. The narrator is very intrigue with the specific wallpaper in this room “sprawling and flamboyant, I never saw such a hideous wall paper” (Gilman). This is the beginning of the road to her becoming completely insane. She talks about how much she hates this room and wouldn’t be able to live there long, but for some odd reason she spends a good portion of her time there writing and looking at the wall paper. She writes to find comfort, and her husband doesn’t let her write so when she does her feels empowered because she’s going against what John says. No matter what she is writing doing or thinking about it always comes back to the wall paper, she is secretly obsessed with it. Slipping in and out of reality constantly, one minute she’s talking about the garden and the other she brings up the wallpaper. Gilman is trying to show the slowly the wallpaper is taking up all of her thoughts and time. The narrator had strange hallucinations about the wall paper, where upside down eyes would stare at her, crawling moving in every way following the patterns of the wallpaper. She feels as if she’s not getting better, always talks about of exhausted she is from smallest things, almost as if she was aging fast. Still obsessed with the wallpaper she starts to look much deeper into it. The narrator starts to see old women behind the pattern creeping, walking, and crawling around the wall. Even though she is starting to fall deeper and deeper into complete insanity we see glimpses of saneness. John as her caretaker likes the house because it’s secluded and she can get better with no distractions. It seems like whatever she wants he does the exact opposite. She wants friends to come over, he denies her request, and she wants the beautiful bed room a giant window and great scenery. He finds excuses that it’s not big enough for two beds which is also quite weird because you don’t hear many married couple that sleep in two different beds. This could also be a part of her treatment; maybe John thinks intimacy is bad for her health. When she realizes that this wallpaper is driving her more and more insane, she feels best if she were to leave however she approaches John with the idea of leaving he just reminds her they only have a few weeks left. Once again we she her have what seems like a better idea for her health, but John just uses his label as a doctor to prove