The second diary entry takes place two weeks later. The entry closes abruptly with a brief mention of John’s approach. The color of the wallpaper as well as the pattern offend the narrator, and she empathizes with the children who previously must have “hated” (133) the room. The windows in this room have bars on the windows, and the “sprawling flamboyant” (133) wallpaper is peeling off the walls. Although the surroundings are beautiful, “there is something strange about the house” (132) itself, and the narrator dislikes the room-“the nursery, at the top of the house” (133)-that John has chosen for their own. The narrator describes their temporary home in detail, marveling over the garden, the paths, and the “grape-covered arbors” (132). Although the narrator writes in secret, she finds working against John’s wishes exhausting, so she “get unreasonably angry with John sometimes” (132). John is a physician, as is the narrator’s brother, and though the narrator accepts that her brother and her husband believe “there is really nothing the matter with one but temporary nervous depression,” she feels they are wrong in forbidding her from doing “congenial work” (131). In the first diary entry, the narrator introduces her husband John, a pragmatic man who “scoffs openly at any talk of things not to be felt and seen and put down in figures” (131).

The ten journal entries vary in length and in tone, but they all trace the mental decline of the narrator, who is suffering from a serious postpartum episode of mental instability. She writes from her bedroom located on the top floor of “ colonial mansion” (131) that she and her husband John are renting for the summer with their infant son and two members of staff. The unnamed narrator of Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s short story “The Yellow Wallpaper” presents her story to the reader over a series of ten revealing diary entries.

Charlotte gilman the yellow wallpaper