Summary and Analysis of Part 5
Part Five: Summary The narrator finds life more exciting now because of the wallpaper. Her health improves, but she does not tell John it is due to the wallpaper for fear he would laugh or take her away. She does not want to leave until she has "found it out," and thinks the remaining week will be enough to do so. The narrator sleeps in the daytime and watches the developments in the wallpaper by night. She finds the smell from the wallpaper - a subtle but enduring odor - creeps over the entire house and gets in her hair. The "yellow smell" was initially disturbing, but now she is used to it. There is also a mark low down on the wall that streaks around the entire room as if it had been rubbed in repeatedly. She wonders why it is there and who did it. At night, the narrator discovers that the wallpaper shakes. She is not sure if it is only one woman in the wallpaper's pattern crawling around fast, or if there are many women. In the bright spots she is still, and in the darker spots she shakes the bars of the pattern and tries to climb through. But no one can get through the pattern, which has strangled and left in place so many women's heads. The narrator believes she sees the wallpaper woman "creeping" outside in the daylight and hiding when others come. The narrator has only two days left to remove the "top pattern" of the wallpaper off "from the other one." John and Jennie are growing suspicious of her. AnalysisThe narrator insists that there is something to be "found...out" in the wallpaper. She reinforces the idea of the wallpaper as holding a tangible meaning she can unlock, and Gilman may as well be telling the reader to do the same with "The Yellow Wallpaper." Both the narrator and the reader try to "peel off" the top pattern of the wallpaper and the story, respectively, to uncover the deeper meaning below. It is becoming clearer that the woman in the wallpaper represents feminine imprisonment. In her domesticated prison of the wallpaper, she stays subdued and still in bright spots but shakes the "bars" in darker spots. So far, brightness has been associated with the rigidity and regularity of male oppression, and darkness has been associated with feminine liberation. The diffusion of the wallpaper's smell symbolizes how the wallpaper is infecting the narrator's mind, one that is increasingly paranoid and suspicious about John and Jennie. As her narrative delivery grows more chaotic and staccato, she identifies more strongly with the woman in the wallpaper. She refers to the pattern as "bars," just as there are bars in her room. Confusingly, when discussing the woman's habit of "creeping" about outside, the narrator says, "I always lock the door when I creep by daylight." She speaks as if she, and not the woman, is the one doing the creeping. The "very funny mark" around the wall foreshadows an action the narrator will take at the story's end.
ClassicNote on The Yellow Wallpaper
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