The Yellow Wallpaper

As usual, I laid in bed the night before class and read this story, The Yellow Wallpaper so that it would be fresh in my mind for discussion the next day. It was longer than some excerpts, but very abstract and interesting (like most that Sweeney assigns) and had an intriguing ending that left you wondering. In summary, my perspective of the story was a woman who had [recently?] been told that she was "sick" by everyone that she loves. Though, her husband still gives her hope that she will get well, she is not allowed to do anything (even so much as write her feelings down). She is ordered to stay in a huge deteriorated room in which she is unfamiliar with to entertain herself for months on end. As if this does not sound excruciatingly miserable enough, she has had her child taken away from her to be cared for by another woman (which is most likely for the best, but is still depressing for her). On the defense of her husband, I believe that in this time when people were expected to be "chronically depressed" or insane that physicians thought that confining someone who is in this mental state to oneself would possibly be the only way/ or perhaps the "cure" to the depression/anxiety/insanity. But, over time we have learned that this solitary confinement method will only drive a person completely crazy, and really do more harm than good. The ending was certainly eery, and all of the possible interpretations of the conclusion are not happy endings. But I still appreciated reading the woman's insight of the experience documented through her secretive entries that she wrote throughout the process of her losing all sense of reality and in the end, truly believing that she was inside of the wallpaper itself.