Gilman's "The Yellow Wallpaper"

To put it simply, this story creeped me out. I can see it being made into a horror film, maybe by M. Night Shyamalan. Spooky. Disturbing. One that gives you the goose bumps. While reading it I had a continuing sense of unease, as if something terrible and inevitable was going to happen, which turned out to be spot on. From the beginning when the narrator declared that "there is something weird about [the house]" in the third line, I knew something unnatural was going to come out of the woodwork.

The plot line was pretty easy to predict honestly. From the little details the narrator gave about the room, like the barred windows, rings in the walls, the bed nailed to the ground, and the wallpaper ripped savagely off the wall, I surmised that the room had a more sinister history than being used as a nursery, playroom, and gymnasium. Then when she started seeing an old woman behind the wallpaper I knew she was going crazy. The thought even crossed my mind that the narrator is or will become the woman creeping along the wall.

I believe the form it was written in, as a stream of conscious thought, added to the eeriness of the story. I was able to track the growth in obsession with the wallpaper. At first it was just a nuisance, an eye-sore, but then it consumed the narrator's every thought. The woman creeping around clearly had to be a hallucination.  If I saw an old woman creeping and crawling around the outside of my home, my reaction would be fear and alarm, not fascination.

I was very impressed with the transition from the narrator being outside the wallpaper and observing the trapped old woman to herself being the one released from the wallpaper. I had to go back and reread the previous lines to make sure I hadn't missed something. Even though I was somewhat expecting it to happen it still caught me a little off guard. It was beautifully done. That would be the point in the movie when the ominous background music gets louder and faster. Then the music would suddenly stop as John comes into the room and observes her insane behavior. When he faints and she continues creeping along the wall, the music would gradually come back. The last scene would be the narrator walking over her husband as she creeps along the wall. Very unnerving.