What do her changing feelings about the wallpaper tell us about thechanges in her condition?
What will be an ideal response?
- The narrator’s feelings about the wallpaper parallel the changes in her condition. Like Gilman herself, this narrator’s condition gets worse as time goes on. At first, the pattern seems nothing more than a random assortment of lines that she says is “one of those sprawling, flamboyant patterns committing every artistic sin” (par. 32), but it soon becomes “torturing” (par. 141). The initial curiosity she felt quickly turns into anxiety, and later moves from fear to terror. One of her many poignant descriptions of the wallpaper occurs in paragraph 142: “It slaps you in the face, knocks you down, and tramples upon you. It is like a bad dream.”
She cannot sleep because she watches the supposed movement in the wallpaper. She is not allowed to write, and so she hides her writing from husband, John, and his sister, afraid they will take away her one outlet of self-expression (par. 73–74). Her attempts to gain mastery over the untamable wallpaper are fruitless, until the very end. Her struggle to decipher a pattern in the wallpaper highlights the futility of her efforts to “recover” when she is, in essence, in perpetual solitary confinement. Ironically, as time goes on it is this increased isolation that causes a mental deterioration.
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a. True b. False
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