The Secret Journal
Fair warning: this is a full summary of The Yellow Wallpaper, by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, with every spoiler, the ending included. It is also about a woman’s mental decline, so I keep it gentle, with nothing graphic. The story is short, so you can read it first in less than an hour.
Here is the short answer. The story is a secret journal. An unnamed woman is told by her doctor husband to rest, to stop writing, and to stop thinking about her illness. So she writes in secret about the wallpaper in her room, and the wallpaper slowly turns into a woman. In my reading, and that is an opinion, the paper is the life other people have laid out for her, and the woman behind it is her. I counted every word myself, and the counts are on screen.
How the Journal Works
I am using the Project Gutenberg edition, ebook number nineteen fifty-two. The text has no entry headings and no dates, so I split it into eleven stretches myself, wherever the time or the mood jumps. In total it is six thousand one hundred sixty-six words by my count, from the first line to the last, without the title or the legal text.
The narrator never writes to anyone. She calls the page dead paper, and she says it is a great relief to her mind. Her husband John is a physician, and so is her brother. They tell people that nothing is really wrong with her. Privately, she disagrees.
John is not written as a cruel man. He carries her upstairs, calls her darling and reads to her. In my reading, that is what makes the list in a minute so chilling.
Watch the shape. Stretch one is nine hundred seventy-five words, and stretch two is one thousand one hundred twenty-six. Then the stretches shrink. Stretch seven is only one hundred twenty-three words, and stretch ten is one hundred twenty-five. Then the last stretch swells back up to nine hundred fourteen.
Stretches One to Three: The Nursery
The couple rent a big old house for the summer. She jokes that it might be haunted, and John laughs at her. He gives her the top room, a former nursery, with barred windows, rings in the walls and a bed that seems to be nailed down. She wanted a room downstairs. He would not hear of it.
Then there is the paper. She says she never saw a worse one, a smouldering, unclean yellow with curves that run off in every direction. John will not repaper it, because he says she is letting it get the better of her. In stretch three she cries when she is alone, follows the pattern for hours, and hears that if she does not improve, John will send her to Weir Mitchell in the fall. She is even glad the baby does not have to live in that room, since she can stand it more easily.
Here is the first count. The word paper, together with wallpaper, shows up four times in stretch one and seven times in stretch two. But look at what is missing. The words creep and woman do not appear in the first three stretches at all. That is two thousand six hundred forty-four words with no woman and no creeping.
What She Is Not Allowed To Do
Now the list. I read the text for what John, her brother and her household forbid, refuse or discourage. Each item is cited by my stretch number, and the quotes are tiny.
She is absolutely forbidden to work, in stretch one. John hates to have her write a word, so she hides her writing when he or his sister comes, in stretches one and two. She cannot choose her room, in stretch one. She cannot have the paper changed, in stretch two. She cannot have visitors, because John says Cousin Henry and Julia would be like fireworks in her pillowcase, in stretch two.
She is told not to give way to fancy, in stretch two. She is told that thinking about her condition is the worst thing she can do, in stretch one. And in stretch five, she tells John she wants to go away, and begins to say she is better in body perhaps. He gives her a stern look, and tells her never to let that idea enter her mind. She stops talking.
Count them up. That is eight things, all in the first five stretches. John calls it care, and she mostly agrees with him. That is exactly what makes the list so hard to read.
Stretches Four to Six: The Woman Appears
In stretch four, she says writing is getting harder. The effort is now greater than the relief. And then comes the line the whole story turns on. In the paper, she says, there is something like a woman stooping down and creeping about behind that pattern.
That is the first time the word woman appears, and the first time the word creeping appears, in the same sentence. In stretch five, by moonlight, the figure behind the pattern seems to shake it, as if she wanted to get out. John lies asleep beside her while she lies awake. The word sleep appears thirteen times in the story, and not once before stretch five.
In stretch six, the pattern turns into bars at night, and she is sure it is a woman. She admits that she does not sleep, and lets them think she does. She is afraid of John now. She catches him, and Jennie, who runs the household, looking at the paper. She decides nobody will find out its secret but her.
Stretches Seven to Ten: Creeping
Stretch seven is only one hundred twenty-three words, and it is oddly cheerful. She says life is more exciting now, because she has something to watch. She feels better, eats better, and does not want to leave until she has found it out. Stretch eight is the smell, a yellow smell that follows her all over the house, and a long smudge low on the wall, as if something had rubbed along it again and again.
Then, in stretch nine, comes the discovery. She decides that the woman behind the pattern shakes it, and that she gets out in the daytime. She sees her outside, creeping along the lane and through the garden, and hiding when a carriage comes. And then the grammar slips. She writes that she always locks the door when she creeps by daylight.
Nine of the twenty creeps in the story are in this one stretch, which is only four hundred forty words. And here is a strange gap. The word paper never appears in stretch nine, the only stretch where it does not. In stretch ten she has two more days, and she hears John question Jennie like a doctor. She says she can see through him, and she feels sure that John and Jennie are secretly affected by the paper too.
The Last Stretch
This is the ending, so here is the spoiler flag again. On the last day, John is away in town until evening. She turns Jennie away, and she and the woman in the wall pull and shake at the paper until yards of it come off. Then she locks the door, and throws the key out into the path. She says outside you have to creep on the ground, and everything is green instead of yellow.
When John comes home, he pounds on the door and asks for an axe. She calmly tells him where the key is, again and again, until he goes to look. He comes in and finds her creeping along the wall. She tells him she has got out at last, and that he cannot put her back. He faints. She keeps creeping, right over him.
Here the counts spike again. Seven of the twenty creeps and four mentions of John are packed into the final nine hundred fourteen words. In my reading, that last line is cold on purpose, and it is the hardest one to forget. If this story feels close to home, please talk to someone you trust, or to a local helpline.
What the Counts Show
Let me put the numbers together. The word John appears forty-five times. Paper and wallpaper together appear thirty-five times. Pattern appears twenty-five times. Creep appears twenty times, woman or women eleven times, sleep thirteen times, and write nine times.
The method is simple. I counted whole words, ignoring capitals, from the first line of the story to the last, with the title and the Gutenberg legal text left out. Creep includes creeps, creeping and creepy. Woman includes women. Write includes writing.
Here is my reading of the pattern. The name John appears ten times in stretch one and not once in stretch eight, while creeping goes from none to nine. The writing stops as the creeping starts. That is an interpretation, not a fact in the text, but the counts support it.
Where It Came From and What It Means
Two outside facts. According to Wikipedia and Wikisource, the story first appeared in January eighteen ninety-two, in The New England Magazine. And in nineteen thirteen, in the magazine The Forerunner, Gilman wrote an essay about why she wrote it.
According to Wikipedia and the Hektoen International article, she says a doctor told her to have only two hours of intellectual life a day and never to touch pen, brush or pencil. She says she followed that for about three months and came close to utter mental ruin. That is her own account, and I say nothing more about her health.
In my reading, then, the wallpaper stands for the arranged life: a pattern repeated by others, with bars at night, and a woman trying to climb out. The ending is tragic and triumphant at once, and you can read it either way. If you want more, the full guide is on bookexplained dot com. Tell me below: what do you think the wallpaper stands for?
