The Yellow Wallpaper The narrator starts off the story by talking about a large old house. She and her husband John are on a summer vacation for three months at this house. The house is a large estate that has been empty for many years, she describes it as haunted. She goes on and says she is sick with temporary nervous depression, one of the reasons they are staying at this house is to help her feel better by getting her fresh air. The house is standing alone far back from the road and three miles from the village. There are gardens, small houses for grounds keepers, and old greenhouses surrounding the house they are staying in. The narrator’s treatment requires her not to do any physical activity including writing. The narrator feels that activity, freedom, and writing would help her condition and says that she has been writing her secret journal in order to relieve her mind. She continues to describe the house, but more specifically the room she is staying in. There are bars over the windows, “rings and things” on the walls, an old mattress that has been through the wars, and a horrid yellow wall paper that has been ripped in spots. Her husband John is very controlling of the narrator and what she does because of her illness. He is a doctor and is limiting things that his wife wants to do. The narrator likes using her imagination but her husband discourages it. She continues describing the bedroom; she thinks it was a nursery for young children. She describes a weird pattern in the wallpaper but is interrupted by her husband. Around the fourth of July her family visits the house but this makes the narrator very tired. The husband is working a lot now and it leaves the narrator home alone, she begins to like the wall paper now. The wall paper looks like a woman stooping down and creeping behind the main pattern, which looks like the bars of a cage. The wall paper becomes the narrators’ main focus and is the only thing she thinks about. She doesn’t sleep much and stays awake looking at the paper and tries to figure it out. She does not want anyone else to look at the paper. The narrator describes the pattern as a woman trying to break free from the main pattern. The narrator sees the woman shaking the bars at night. She thinks that her husband and the housekeeper know about the wall paper, so she peels as much of it down when they are not around. She bites, tares, and rips the paper to try to free the woman. The narrator thinks there are many women like the one from the yellow paper around. She also thinks that she came out of the wallpaper. Her husband tries to break into the bedroom of his wife which is locked and when he does and sees the condition of her he faints in the doorway.