"The Yellow Wallpaper"

The narration follows a woman’s thoughts as she descends from sanity to insanity. At the onset, the narrator is convinced, much at the prompting of her husband, that she is ill, though her thinking and reactions are reasonable. A disliking for the wallpaper for esthetic reason becomes obsession, obsession becomes insanity. "This paper looks to me as if it knew what a vicious influence it had!” is the first hint of her degrading state of mind. Her obsession of frivolous “fancies” concerning aspects of the house is actually a reaction to not being able to live a normal life and engage to normal activities. “I’m getting really fond of the room in spite of the wallpaper. Perhaps because of the wallpaper” she thinks, as delusion sets in when distain becomes fondness, the wallpaper being the only thing on which she is allowed to focus. As the story progresses, isolation causes her imagination to become more and more vivid, convinced a woman “lives” behind the design in the wallpaper. In the end, true insanity sets in to the point where she is the woman, escaping the wallpaper, symbolically escaping her chains of isolation.