Summary and Analysis of Part 6
Part Six: Summary They are leaving the house soon and servants pack up the furniture. John has to stay overnight in town. Jennie wants to sleep with the narrator, but the narrator tells her she will sleep better on her own. When the moon comes out, however, the woman in the wallpaper shakes the pattern. The narrator helps her by pulling off the paper. By morning, she has peeled off a head-high strip halfway around the room. In the morning, Jennie sees the half-stripped wallpaper and jokes that she would not mind doing it herself, but that the narrator should rest. The narrator wants to be the only one who touches it, and she is suspicious of Jennie. Night comes and the narrator is alone. She locks the door and throws the key down into the front path. She wants to astonish John when he comes in. She has a rope to tie up the woman in case she tries to get away. She cannot reach high up along the wall, and she cannot move the bed. She pulls off what she can reach, and hears within the pattern the "strangled heads and bulbous eyes and fungus growths...shriek with derision." Frustrated and angry, the narrator wants to jump out the window, but the bars are solid, and an action like that might be "misconstrued." She does not even like to look out the window, as all the women creep about. She wonders if they came out of the wallpaper as she did. She ties herself up with the rope. Though she enjoys creeping about the room, she thinks she will have to get back inside the wallpaper when it "comes night." John tries to open the locked door, but he cannot. The narrator tells him where the key is, and he finds it and enters. He asks her what she is doing as she creeps around. She tells him that she has finally gotten out of the wallpaper despite him and "'Jane,'" and that she has pulled off most of the wallpaper so they cannot put her back. John faints, but the narrator keeps creeping over him as she goes around the room. AnalysisThe narrator's insanity climaxes as she identifies completely with the woman in the wallpaper. She believes that not only has the woman come out of the wallpaper, but so has she. Again, the symbolic meaning is that both she and the woman have liberated themselves from masculine oppression; by tearing out of the domesticated prison of the wallpaper, they are free. This moment of liberation again occurs by moonlight when, according to the motif Gilman has drawn, women have a break from the oppression of masculine sunshine. Some readers believe the narrator's mention of "'Jane" is an early uncorrected typo for "Jennie," but most acknowledge that Jane is the narrator's name (and a very plain one that is the perfect complement to "John"). With her statement that she has gotten out of the wallpaper despite John and Jane, she suggests that not only her husband, but also she herself has contributed to her imprisonment. She has allowed John to dominate her and curb her freedom, but this new self - one made up of the woman in the wallpaper and all the other women she sees "creeping" about - has broken free. However, the odd verb "creeping" continually represents this act of breaking free. Creeping - either crawling or walking while hunched over - implies a gesture of subservience. The narrator (and the women creeping outside) is always afraid of being caught, so she must creep about. Still, this may indicate that early feminism needed to "creep" about silently in the shadows until it could stand tall. The multitudes of women the narrator sees are these early practitioners of feminism, who draw strength in their numbers and who have crept out of the wallpaper and now creep outside. Gilman points out, therefore, that the narrator's liberation is incomplete. Her total insanity, of course, makes this more evident. Gilman drops clues in this section to indicate the room was previously used to house the insane and not as a nursery. The bars on the window are to prevent someone from jumping out, as the narrator contemplates doing; the immovable bed is "fairly gnawed" (and the narrator bites it, too); and the strange mark around the periphery of the room may be from someone else's repetitive crawling about. There is one final irony that avenges the narrator's insanity: John's fainting is a stereotypically feminine show of weakness. Perhaps the differences between the genders are not so great after all.
ClassicNote on The Yellow Wallpaper
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