Unpacking a Quotation

"There is a recurrent spot where the pattern lolls like a broken neck and two bulbous eyes stare at you upside down. I get positively angry with the impertinence of it and the everlastingness.  Up and down and sideways they crawl, and those absurd, unblinking eyes are every­where.  There is one place where two breaths didn't match, and the eyes go all up and down the line, one a little higher than the other.”

In this passage from “The Yellow Wallpaper” by Charlotte Perkins Stetson, the narrator is beginning to see things again and again in the patterns of the "wall paper".  Using the description of the pattern as “a broken neck” that lolls and “bulbous eyes” gives an idea that the narrator is becoming the compulsion with the wallpaper by telling the images. It makes her worried. It also shows that the wallpaper disturbs the narrator and draws her into the paper, as if drawing her deeper into her mental illness. The narrator is beginning to see things in the paper.  Instead of just being an atrocious paper, she is starting to see things in the paper. Therefore, when her husband John tries to explain that there is no scarce thing at home, she thinks about it again and again.  Moreover, she feels worries about “Ghost” or something which she always imagines at home.  All of these moments have happened   because of her depression and felling uncomfortable at new home.

The words “two bulbous eyes”   give us the idea that the wallpaper behaves as human characterizes. She explains in this story that “two bulbous eyes” looks her with staring eyes. It is all about narrator’s imagination.  For example, her husband believes that she is suffering from anxiety and a little depression.  Therefore, she tries to find some clues of imaginative power or something like “Human” on the spot.  However, it seems that the narrator has problems in adjusting at new place and also she is feeling mental disorder.

 “Up and down and sideways they crawl, and those absurd, unblinking eyes are every­where.” The narrator looks wherever, she finds something existed at home. The narrator’s psychological situation at new home maybe describe here. For example, she feels herself observed by the ‘eyes’ on the wallpaper.  Then she starts to treat ‘imaginative’ observations as though they are real.  She says that the ‘unblinking eyes’ are ‘crawl’ ‘everywhere’. Perhaps her imagination is causing her to begin losing control of her thoughts.

It seems that the narrator always imagines something at home. It suggests that she may be mentally depressed. She always looks everywhere at house and feels anxiety imagining something in a wrong way.  She is mentally ill, and her husband never helps her. He believes that it is a woman’s illness and not an actual sickness. If it happens to anyone, we should think about the treatment of mentally ill.