![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() Eventually, she locks herself in the room, now the only place she feels safe, refusing to leave when the summer ends. Towards the end of the story, she imagines there are women creeping behind the patterns of the wallpaper and comes to believe she is one of them. With nothing to stimulate her, she becomes obsessed with the pattern and colour of the wallpaper. The author depicts the effect of under stimulation on the narrator’s mental health and her deterioration into psychosis. The room’s openings are grilled to prevent children from climbing through them, and there is a gate across the top of the stairs, though she and her husband have access to the rest of the house and its adjoining estate. The woman hides her journal from her husband and his sister the housekeeper, fearful of being accused of overburdening herself. As a form of treatment, the unnamed woman is forbidden from working and is encouraged to eat well and get plenty of exercise and air so that she can recuperate from what he calls a ‘temporary nervous depression-a slight hysterical tendency’, a diagnosis common to women in that period. Forgoing other rooms in the house, the couple moves into the upstairs nursery. The story is presented in the first person with a collection of journal entries written by a woman whose physician husband (John) has rented an old mansion for the summer. ![]()
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