Yellow Wallpaper, The by Charlotte Perkins Gilman ~ Short Stories

[marcie]

The Book Club Online is  the oldest  book club on the Internet, begun in 1996, open to everyone.  We offer cordial discussions of one book a month,  24/7 and  enjoy the company of readers from all over the world.  Everyone is welcome.

Short Story Event - JUNE/JULY Book Club Online

It is said that a good short story should include: * a strong theme, * a fascinating plot, * a fitting structure, * unforgettable characters, * a well-chosen setting, * an appealing style.  Let's consider these elements as we discuss the following stories.  Is it necessary to include them all in a successful story?  
  

Notice that the titles are all links to the stories.

Discussion Schedule:
June 1 -June 9: *The Book of The Funny Smells--and Everything (1872) by Eleanor H Abbott *The Necklace or The Diamond Necklace (1880) -  by Guy de Maupassant
  *A Pair of Silk Stockings (1896) by Kate Chopin
June 10- 14: *Babylon Revisited (1931) by F.Scott Fitzgerald
June 15- 17: *First Confession (1939) by Frank O'Connor
June 18-20: *A Good Man Is Hard to Find (1953) by Flannery O'Connor  
June 21-24: *The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas (1973) by Ursula LeGuin
June 25-28: *The Half-skinned Steer (1997) by Annie Proulx
June 29-July 2 *The Bear Came Over the Mountain(1999) by Alice Munro
July 5 - July 8:  *The Lady with the Dog by Anton Chechov 1899
July 9 - July 13:  *The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman 1890
July 14 - July 17:  *Chip Off the Old Block by Wallace Stegner11942

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The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman

During 1890, when she was 30 years old, Charlotte Perkins Gilman wrote The Yellow Wallpaper (along with 33 short articles and 23 poems) and published the story in 1892. The story's meaning has intrigued readers since its initial printing, its reprinting in 1920 in William Dean Howell's collection of the best American short stories, and in the story's many reprintings since then.

Topics for Consideration

July 9 - July 13

The story seems to hold a lot of symbolism and, due to its richness, continues to be interpreted in many diverse ways. It doesn't seem that we can go wrong in applying our own thoughts to its many aspects. 1. What are some of the details that struck you? 2. What does the story say to you?

DL Contact: Marcie

 

[marcie]

Welcome to our next short story. It's another one where the "inner life" of the protagonist is at the forefront. It's also one that reflects on various social issues of the time.

I've read that Charlotte Perkins Gilman suffered from, and was treated for, what was then called "nervous prostration" after the birth of her only daughter when she was 25 years old. Perhaps that sheds some light on her detailed depiction of the woman in The Yellow Wallpaper.

What are some of your thoughts about the story? What are some of the details that struck you?

[JoanP]

Good morning, Marcie!  I haven't finished reading Yellow Wallpaper yet, but there were two things that struck me at the start.

* this story was written about the same time Chechov wrote "The Lady with the Dog," the story we have been reading this past week.  Both stories shed light on how women were regarded at the time - and how women responded to the way they were treated.

At the start of this story, I felt the wife was a prisoner - and her description of the room seemed to verify this.

* From its first mention, I kept asking myself, WHERE IS THE  BABY? Knowing about the author's  "nervous prostration" - post- partum depression? - puts the story in a different light - though I still feel that the treatment does nothing to alleviate her condition.  

Off to finish the story - and hope for the best!

[marcie]

You are up early, JoanP! Thanks for posting even before you finished the story. It's good information to know that the story was written about the same time as THE LADY AND THE DOG. That lady cried quite a bit. It seemed one avenue to let out her feelings. She didn't have many choices. I too think that how woman were regarded and how they responded to their treatment is at the heart of this story.

She sure did seem a prisoner in that room. It's so interesting how she, the narrator, lets us into her conflicted feelings. She has perceptions of herself but they are not the ones that her husband (the doctor) and society wants to see. She wants to fit the "normal" idealized woman of the time. She doesn't want to disappoint.

[PatH]

That's quite a story!  I read it a week ago, and want to look at it again before commenting.  For a start, my perception of what was really happening changed through the course of the story.

[Winchesterlady]

What a story!  I have been meaning to read this for some time and am sorry I waited so long.

This woman was put in an upstairs room with bars on the windows and a gate preventing access to downstairs.  And that awful wallpaper!  The room sounded more like it had been used as a place for torture rather than a nursery.

First of all, I would like to do physical harm to her husband, John! But, after thinking about it, he was really doing what he thought was the correct thing to do for his wife.  And, how reliable a narrator is the wife? What had she done before she was put in the room?

It was interesting to read Charlotte Perkins Gilman's explanation of why she wrote this short story.  Many people were upset that it was published. Thank goodness her physician read it and started to change the way he treated his female patients dealing with, what is now known as, postpartum depression.

[JoanK]

I read the story years ago. It is an accurate description, so I understand, of the way physicians were treating women with depression (and self-validating. If you didn't have depression when you went in, you sure would after awhile).

Off to reread the story. I've forgotten how it ends.

[JoanK]

Well, I read it. Really good writing, and makes me as angry now as it did when I first read it.

[marcie]

Thanks for all the comments. It seems like we're all angry at the situation of this woman...and women of her times. They were being tortured by the all-in-good-faith care of the men and women who listened to the men around them.

Winchesterlady, I'm so glad that you've joined us. The wife kept saying that she realized that her physician husband was doing everything out of love for her but her own knowledge of herself kept bubbling up and telling her that "the treatment" was wrong for her. Thanks for sharing the information that Gilman says that she wrote the story to try to wake up doctors like the one who treated her. Complete bed rest; no stimulation; no reading or writing; no visitors; especially no exercising of "imagination"; mostly sleep all day. I read that Gilman was desperate at the time for help with her severe depression. She went along with the treatment but afterward recognized how unhelpful and actually harmful it was.

PatH, you say your perception of what was happening changed throughout the story. It seems that is due to what JoanK has called "really good writing." Gilman is really able to paint a portrait of a woman slipping into madness, at least that is what it seems to me is happening. We get inside her head...but, as Winchesterlady says, how reliable is the inside of a mad woman's head?

I've been wondering about the room that seems like a prison. The wife jumps to the conclusion that it was a nursery (with bars on the windows and a huge bed nailed to the floor?) Were there really rips in the wallpaper when she first came to the house?  How do you think the room was used in the past?

[PatH]

It’s true that as we watch the narrator slip farther from reality we become less certain what’s real and what isn’t, but that wasn’t all of what I meant by my perception changing.


To a fan of early mystery and horror stories, this one at first seems to fit neatly into a pattern—the husband who is going to murder his unsuspecting wife.  All the elements are there.  He isolates her from help, takes her to a suspicious place.  He’s incredibly controlling about what she does.  She has to sleep in the room she doesn’t like, can’t have the support of the people who would cheer her up (or guess what was going on).  The room itself is suspicious; the windows are barred, and the bed has been fixed to the floor (see The Speckled Band for possible significance).  There are signs that others have been in trouble there.  Even the wallpaper—I can’t remember the name, and my internet searches were fruitless, but there is an early mystery short story in which someone is being poisoned by the green wallpaper.  (It’s an arsenic compound, Paris green, which was used as a dye before people realized how toxic it was.) I don’t know of a yellow, but there might very well be one.  Slow poisoning could account for her increasing irrationality.

As the story moves on, and things get more and more unreal, I became more and more uncertain of what was going on, whether I had categorized the story correctly.  Increasingly, you have no idea of reality, but everything is so vivid you can almost drown in it.

[JoanP]

Oh I agree, Pat!  At the start her husband, John, seemed reasonable to me.  He doesn't believe she's sick, thinks her depression is temporary - nothing that fresh air, diet, a tonic and exercise wouldn't cure.  AND her own brother, also a doctor, agrees with him.  At the same time we read of the strange room - a nursery,  a child's play room?  I don't think so. The barred windows...the gouged flooring, wallpaper scraped to the plaster - the bednailed to the floor?  - and how did you understand those rings set into the wall, Winchesterlady?  We never hear more about the room - or what it had been used for.  We are kept in the dark what it was used for - as was this poor woman.  

Even as John seems caring and reasonable, you have to doubt him- simply because of this room she is kept in.   Remember when John tells her if she doesn't improve he's going to have to send her to another doctor - to Weir Mitchell?  She thinks he's just like John.  He is!  It was such an uncommon name, I just had to look him up -

"Silas Weir Mitchell (February 15, 1829 – January 4, 1914) was an American physician and writer... He was Charlotte Perkins Gilman's doctor and his use of a rest cure on her provided the idea for "The Yellow Wallpaper", a short story in which the narrator is driven insane by her rest cure.

 His treatment was also used on Virginia Woolf, who wrote a savage satire of it: "you invoke proportion; order rest in bed; rest in solitude; silence and rest; rest without friends, without books, without messages; six months rest; until a man who went in weighing seven stone six comes out weighing twelve!"
 Sigmund Freud reviewed Mitchell's book on The Treatment of Certain Forms of Neurasthenia and Hysteria in 1887;[5] and used electrotherapy in his wake into the 1890s.
 Freud also adopted Mitchell's use of physical relaxation as an adjunct to therapy, which arguably resulted eventually in the employment of the psychoanalytic couch."

  Silas Weir Mitchell

 

[Winchesterlady]

Actually, I thought those rings on the walls might be manacles ... but, perhaps I read too many mysteries.  I've been doing some searching on the web to find out more about Charlotte Perkins Gilman.   A few interesting things I've discovered are that she was the niece of Harriet Beecher Stowe; she divorced her husband and later married her first cousin; and after learning that she had inoperable cancer, she took her own life.  You can find more about her at:

http://www.library.csi.cuny.edu/dept/history/lavender/386/cgilman.html.

[PatH]

I thought they were manacles too, or something to tie someone to.

[JoanK]

Clearly, someone else had been confined in that room, and become mad in the same way she did. when she first entered there were pieces of wallpaper hanging down, marks along the floor as if someone else had crawled around the room the same way she had. The woman in the wallpaper is a symptom of the narrator's madness, but also, surely, the other woman who had preceeded her there.

[BarbStAubrey]

And to think it was in the 1950s we accused China and North Korea as introducing us to Brain Washing - or Mind Control - I wonder what ever happened to those, wasn't it 14, captured US soldiers who made statements denouncing the US so that we denounced them. We used to call Asians, especially if we were at war with them, yellow.

[salan]

Read the story...Blech!!  I am really trying; but fail to see the merit in most of these short stories.  I was determined to give short stories another chance, since we so often get stuck in a rut claiming we don't like something that we haven't tried in a while.  Now I've tried and can comfortably claim that I still don't like short stories.  Evidently they are not my genre.  I have enjoyed everyone's discussion on these stories.
Sally 

I couldn't determine if the woman was already on the road to madness (instead of just being depressed) or if her husband drove her there!  What a pompous prick he was!

[marcie]

JoanK and everyone, thanks for the speculation of who was in the room before the wife. It also seems to me that someone who was "mad," or became mad in the room, was a former occupant.

PatH, what a well-developed mind  you have for the mystery genre! Your version of the plot would make a great mystery story. JoanP, thanks for looking up S. Weir Mitchell, who treated Charlotte Perkins Gilman with his "rest cure" and who, she says, is responsible for her writing the story to shock him into realizing its effect on some people. The doctor developed the cure in response to "nervous injuries" (post-traumatic stress disorder?) suffered by soldiers during the Civil War. It seems he wasn't paying attention to the women he treated since he thought that the same treatment would help them.

Winchesterlady, I appreciate the link to the site with the short bio of Gilman. It's interesting that "she gained fame with her lectures on women's issues, ethics, labor, human rights, and social reform and that "Gilman and her work were mostly forgotten for two decades until the feminist movement of the 1960s revived interest in her."

Salan, as JoanP brought up, in this case anyway, the author had something definite in mind in writing this type of story. At the end of an article she wrote in the October 1913 issue of The Forerunner, she says of her story: "It was not intended to drive people crazy, but to save people from being driven crazy, and it worked." The whole (short) article is at http://www.library.csi.cuny.edu/dept/history/lavender/whyyw.html

Barbara, yes, "mind control" readily comes to mind as we see the interactions between the doctor/husband and his wife. "No, all those things you say you are feeling or thinking are not real. You should not be using your mind at all, except to further the domestic life of the home."

[PatH]

The techniques of treatment used here--sensory deprivation, isolation from human contact, lack of activity, both physical and mental--are now used to break down prisoners and are generally regarded as torture.

[JoanP]

It makes you wonder why the eminent doctors of the time could not understand this would be the outcome of such treatment, doesn't it, Pat?  I wouldn't be surprised if the isolated rental wasn't recommended to John as a suitable place for his wife's "cure"  by a professional friends who had treated one (or more) of his own patients here -

I have a mental image of the bed nailed to the floor, the "patient" lying in the bed, with arms tied to those rings - rendering her immobile if necessary.  Do you think all former patients receiving such treatment - were women?

Thanks Marcie,  for the link to Charlotte Gilman's thoughts - her reasons for writing this story -  " It was not intended to drive people crazy, but to save people from being driven crazy..."

I have no doubt it worked, but I also think she gives insight without really being aware of it -  into how women were regarded at the close of the century - and how they were reacting to this.  Clearly her husband loved her, was concerned about her, but with so little consideration for her needs or respect for her feelings.  She's treated like a little child - how many times does he refer to her as "dear girl" - "little girl."
Except to the passing reference to the baby, who is living in the house, do we ever see her holding him, spending time with him?

I think she wrote this story, as she says, as a criticism of the treatment, but it turns out she reveals a lot more of women's position at this time.  And also how women are secretly beginning to react to their second-class status.

Salan - have you noticed just how autobiographical nearly ALL of these stories are?  Maybe that's a clue as to why they were written...not to entertain the reader, but to convey a personal message - in a creative way.  Just wondering...



 

[marcie]

PatH and JoanP, I too wonder that the doctors could not see the "torturous" effect of their treatment. Perhaps because there was some kernal of truth in it. In her autobiography, Gilman herself says that her affliction (severe depression I think) required her to pull back from some activities at periods throughout her life.

She says:

"After I was finally free [after separating from her husband], in 1890, wreck though I was, there was a surprising output of work, some of my best. I think that if I could have had a period of care and rest then, I might have made full recovery. But the ensuing four years in California were the hardest of my life. The result has been a lasting loss of power, total in some directions, partial in others; the necessity for a laboriously acquired laziness foreign to both temperament and conviction, a crippled life.

    But since my public activities do not show weakness, nor my writings, and since brain and nerve disorder is not visible, short of lunacy or literal “prostration,” this lifetime of limitation and wretchedness, when I mention it, is flatly disbelieved. When I am forced to refuse invitations, to back out of work that seems easy, to own that I cannot read a heavy book, apologetically alleging this weakness of mind, friends gibber amiably, “I wish I had your mind!” I wish they had, for a while, as a punishment for doubting my word. What confuses them is the visible work I have been able to accomplish. They see activity, achievement, they do not see blank months of idleness; nor can they see what the work would have been if the powerful mind I had to begin with had not broken at twenty-four." [The Living of Charlotte Perkins Gilman, p. 98.]

 Maybe the doctors just went too far in their prescribed rest treatment. They should have watched and listened to their patients more and individualized and timed the treatment for each.

[BarbStAubrey]

Thought of something - it may not have been written as such but it could be an inner story - a story of what we do to ourselves when we are presented with a life altering change - we often go through a stage where we trap ourselves in a yellow room within - our past and our desire to feel safe and comfortable pulling us into what is not our current reality so that we are our own doctor saying this is safe and what we deserve since we cannot cope with the change presented to us. We can give ourselves an awful time and to others we would sound out of sink if not out of character.

I really do not want to re-read to compare bits but it strikes close to home as I have often come to the end of one phase in my life and struggle to figure out what is important to me that is my purpose for living - I can even find photos of what I like but to weave them into what for a few years we called a Mission Statement often takes an inner journey that starts with me feeling bereft from action and a reason to act. As if manacled to the unknown and trying to make sense of a past to find the kernel of who I am and what is me.

When I am in one of these re-evaluation stages of life it is easy to isolate within myself, my home and behind a book.

[JoanK]

"I have no doubt it worked, but I also think she gives insight without really being aware of it -  into how women were regarded at the close of the century - and how they were reacting to this. (bolds mine). Oh, she was very aware of it. She is a well known spokesman for women's rights, as several of you have pointed out.

The statement quoted above about her mind and periods of disability is very interesting. She attributes it to the way she was treated, but I wouldn't be surprised if many creative people experiences the same thing. There seems to be a heavy price to pay for whatever fire lights these periods of creative work that some people have.

[marcie]

Barbara, I came across an article about the symbolism in The Yellow Wallpaper that interprets some of the wife's later feelings about the room being her only refuge from her husband and the world (the garden) that seems to speak to me of the "self-isolation" that you write about in your post.

"The Narrator’s opinion of the garden, which symbolizes the world of possibilities unavailable to women of her day, changes during the story from appearing “delicious” to loathsome and frightening. As her mind retreats further into the safe, female world revealed in the moonlit sub-patter of the wallpaper, the actual, sun-drenched world of the garden ceases to be desirable becomes aligned with the fear of discovery. At first she feared that her physician/husband would discover her writing, then that he would discover her affinity with the wallpaper and finally, that he and the male-dominated world discover her “creeping” (itself symbolic of her escape). She observes that the women who escape from the wallpaper and enter the garden are forced to creep and hide, just as she must during the daylight when the wallpaper’s pattern subsumes the sub-pattern. So, the Narrator she prefers the bare room in which she can “creep” without fear of discovery."
http://www.novelguide.com/The-Yellow-Wallpaper/metaphoranalysis.html

[marcie]

JoanK, yes, I think that Gilman chose her words and images carefully. Her use of the wife as narrator, writing down her thoughts, is so powerful.
 I definitely feel the anguish of the wife who has no one to turn to. It seems that there are lively relatives whose visit she thinks would help cheer her but her physician husband is adamant that that kind of stimulation would be detrimental to her. And she can't even move to a room downstairs, let alone move out of the house early Everything she tries to tell him meets with resistance.

After one evening's attempt to ask her husband if they could leave the house early: "So of course I said no more on that score, and we went to sleep before long. He thought I was asleep first, but I wasn't, and lay there for hours trying to decide whether that front pattern and the back pattern really did move together or separately."

It's so "matter of fact" it's chilling.

What are some descriptions or other passages that impressed you?

[JoanP]

So much to think about - thank you  all for all of Gilman's writings regarding this story - and for your own insights and reactions!  Two things I've been thinking about -

Have you come across any information for the treatment of men suffering from depression at this time?  I'm sure there must have been - but cannot imagine their submission to such treatment - but how was depression treated in men?

[JoanP]

What are some descriptions or other passages that impressed you?

There were quite a few - but the description of all those creatures in the wallpaper were chilling.  When I was a kid, we  had wallpaper in our bedrooms.  The patterns were always of interest - especially at nap time, or whenever there was still light enough to make out.  My sister and I would confer at length about what we were seeing - or imagining we saw in the patterns.  With nothing to do, nothing to  read all day, it wasn't surprising that this imprisoned wife didn't get involved in the yellow wallpaper pattern  creatures, insects(?) crawling everywhere, upside-down, bulbous unblinking eyes - and see parallels to her own situation.
 
As time goes by, she realizes that one of them is a crawling woman, trying to get out  from behind the pattern - from that point on, the woman becomes herself.  But all of the other crawling creatures she left behind - they represent the other women still imprisoned.  No wonder she wrote this story to help those she left behind!

Can someone refresh my memory?  How was she finally able to get through?

[JoanK]

"How was she finally able to get through?"

She wasn't. It just leaves her creeping over the fainting body of her husband.

[PatH]

The crawling woman may have also literally been herself.  Somewhere the relative who is helping out gathers the narrators clothes to wash, remarking that the wallpaper dye comes off on everything.

[marcie]

Have you come across any information for the treatment of men suffering from depression at this time?  I'm sure there must have been - but cannot imagine their submission to such treatment - but how was depression treated in men?

JoanP, I tried to fiind some info on differences in treatment between men and women and only found articles about women being diagnosed with mental illness in greater numbers than men. Any behaviour that deviated from the "norm" could be considered evidence of mental illness. Since women's lives were more restricted than men's--restricted to fewer "acceptable" behaviours-- women were in jeopardy of being treated if they seemed "troublesome" or in any way didn't meet the expectations of an uncaring or overprotective and caring family.

JoanK, yes, the "creepy" ending sees her creeping over her fainted husband.

PatH, that was my initial take also on the sister-in-law finding a yellow substance on the wife's clothes -- that the wife was the one working on the wallpaper. Another interpretation I found was that the rest of the family paid little attention to the surroundings of the wife and it took the sister-in-law some time to even notice that the wallpaper "shed" a yellow substance.

[BarbStAubrey]

Aniline dyes, developed by William Perkin in the 1850s, were the beginning of the end of mineral pigments widely used in interior décor. Chromium, cadmium, mercury, lead, cyanide, antimony and arsenic salts were commonplace used in paint, wallpaper, food and dye for yarn, thread and fabrics.

The arsenic pigments Scheele’s green and Emerald green, the mercurial vermilion, green lead chromate, cadmium yellow, arsenical Naples ’s yellow, the cyanide salt Prussian blue, were the staple colors used to brighten up the Georgian and Victorian home. Whites were often lead white or arsenic trioxide.

In the early days aniline dyes were far from safe with arsenious acid, used as a reductant in the dye manufacture, often present in high concentrations.

[marcie]

Barbara, here is also some information on orpiment, a yellow dye.  http://www.livingrockstudios.org/wp/rocks-minerals/orpiment/

"Orpiment smells of garlic [remember the smell the narrator talks about?] and it is thought that the use of this mineral as pigment for wallpaper is what caused Napoleon’s death by long term arsenic poisoning, as the wallpaper got wet through humidity and released small doses of arsenic into the air."

[marcie]

Joan, you mention that "the description of all those creatures in the wallpaper were chilling." I agree. Just as you had wallpaper in your bedroom so did I when I was about 5, I think. It covered one wall with huge dots and two floor-to-ceiling rabbits. The paper was pinkish and the rabbits were white. The rabbits sort of glowed in the dark if light hit them. I was scared to death. The paper had to go!

[JoanP]

Did you peel the bunny paper off yourself, Marcie? I don't remember disliking my wallpaper. - it was a distraction from boredom...

Glad you brought up the wallpaper's odor.  I had concluded the smell was the moldy paper  due to the humidity...but surprised that John stayed in the room with her on the occasions he spent the night.  Surely he could smell it too?  Don't you think he would have been concerned...as a doctor?  Repulsed by it?  Or is the odor emanating from the paper another manifestation of her mental state regarding the paper?

[JoanP]

       "I've got out at last," said I, "in spite of you and Jane. And I've pulled off most of the paper, so you can't put me back!"

So, this is a triumphant happy ending, then?  Our heroine has survived the treatment by taking matters into her own hands - has survived the treatment - and it's time to return to her life now?  Free from the confinement, the room and the wallpaper  as she crawls out the door, over her husband's body?  Is that how you understand the ending?

Or has she gone completely mad?

[BarbStAubrey]

I think it can be taken either way - it could be the doctor was not aware of the dye in the wallpaper being a problem - medicine was very primitive even when I was a kid before WWII - it was mostly in the 20s and the 1930s when dye was broadened as a basis for medicines. If I remember it was Hitler who pushed the development of dye for synthetic rubber, (a war cannot be waged without rubber), explosive material and medicine. The first conglomerate was German with a dye and paint company at its base so we had Bayer and Farber - a few others who I have forgotten - 5 companies in all forming the first conglomerate and we know the history of Bayer who continued concentration camp like tactics in Africa through into the 1990s to test all sorts of drugs that all emanate from dye.  

[JudeS]

I've been on vacation and have returned to a busy weekend. I am participating in a large book fair in a nearby city and my book for children will be one of the features. First time participating in something like this. Exciting but nerve wracking i.e. what did I forget?
Will join you when all calms down.

[JoanK]

" Is that how you understand the ending?"

No, the opposite. She has to crawl over him to continue to crawl around the room.

[marcie]

JoanP, LOL. No it never occured to me to peel off the bunny wallpaper. For one thing, my parents would have killed me!

Like JoanK, I think that the wife just keeps creeping in circles around the edge of the room and crawling over her husband each time. "Now why should that man have fainted? But he did, and right across my path by the wall, so that I had to creep over him every time!"

But, JoanP, I agree with you that tearing off the wallpaper and creeping around is the only "control" she is able to exercise but it seems like it's at the expense of her sanity.

The last scenes in the story (before she throws the door key out the window into the garden and starts her continuous creeping) say that she and John are to sleep downstairs tonight and go home tomorrow. It's not clear what will or can happen. With John's reaction of fainting, it doesn't seem that he can cope with his wife's state of mind. Will he just go downstairs with her and sleep there at night and go home with her in the morning? Or will he call in reinforcements-- another doctor-- and have her given other treatment at home or in an institution? Or??

[BarbStAubrey]

I still think she was affected by the chemicals in the wallpaper so that there was no telling if her depression improved or not. I think it would take more than one night downstairs for her to improve - but what happened next is only for conjecture - I remember having a book as a child that was filled with only what happened then for most of the children's fairytales - I thought my what happened next stories in my head were more satisfying.

For this one being true to my child imagination I would have whoever the housekeeper was that took care of the husband while she was being 'cured' come up to check on things - grab her and take her to her sisters who lives on the other side of town - get back before he comes to - then there would be a mass search for her - a week later it would die down and the husband would be depressed an inconsolable - the housekeeper would test the waters to learn what the husband would do if his wife returned by asking him to imagine she was with them in the kitchen or in the garden or if she was sitting by the fire crying etc. Till she had a good idea how he would treat her knowing he loved her but if he saw her as capable rather than ill.

If the housekeeper was satisfied than the wife would simply be there one evening - and the husband would be so deliriously happy he would not even question where she was and later when he did she would say she was given a miraculous cure. If the housekeeper was not satisfied, she would arrange for the wife and her child to become a cook on a ranch or in the northwest at a lumber camp. She and her sister would disguise the wife and help her escape. hahaha -

Oh I would be days imagining the questions the housekeeper would ask the husband and then days figuring out how the housekeeper would break it to the wife she had to leave - as fast as I had the story down something would pop into my head that became another problem that had to be solved in the story. All that till I was deep into another story.

[marcie]

Barbara,  you're right that we can only conjecture. Wow, you have a rich imagination. You could write a sequel to the story.

We can continue to conjecture or talk about any aspects of this story. On Sunday, we're going to start talking about CHIP OFF THE OLD BLOCK by Wallace Stegner.