For this week’s blog I would like to summarize one of the assigned short stories. The story is The Yellow Wallpaper, written by Charlotte Perkins Gilman.  This will not be an in-depth literary analysis, but a short plot overview.  The story begins with a narrator who is never named.  She is taken by her husband John to a house in the country where she may recover from an illness which is plaguing her.  Her treatment for this mysterious sickness is to rest.  She is encouraged neither to work nor write; which she does in secret in a journal, which she hides from her husband.  While the narrator feels that physical and mental simulation would in fact help her condition, her husband thinks otherwise.  She is confined to a room where she begins to do nothing but stare at the yellow wall paper which covers the room. From the lack of human contact, she begins to give the wallpaper more and more human qualities, until finally has a mental breakdown. The story ends with the narrator ripping the wall paper from the walls in a desperate attempt to free herself.  While there are several symbols in the story, the main one is the yellow wallpaper.  At first the wallpaper is nothing but wallpaper.  As the story progresses however, the wallpaper becomes a physical manifestation of her confinement, a prison if you will.  Not only physically where she is forced in to isolation by her husband, but mentally as well in the social convention of marriage, where a women’s husband had complete control over her.