smell of the wallpaper as well as its shifting patterns and changing shades of yellow (476). Her noticing that the wallpaper has a musty, moldy smell shows the extent of her mind's decay. At the end, she notices the "women creeping" in the paper, and all she desires is to free them (478 & 479). The reader can now see that the wife has gone totally and irreversibly mad. Evidences that suggest her insanity includes creeping around the room, gnawing the bedpost in frustration, tearing paper off the walls, and then locking the door, and tossing out the key into the bushes (479, 480, & 481). However, we as readers can only fully appreciate the progress of the wife's descent into insanity and feel for her plight because we see the situation from her perspective. Also, because the wife has no name, the reader can put him or herself into the wife's situation. From this perspective we get a vivid depiction of what it is like to go mad. If the story had been told from a limited omniscient or omniscient point of view, too much detail would have been given. It would have cluttered the story, lessened the reader's sympathy for the wife, and detracted from the central theme of the story (the wife's growing obsession with the wallpaper {her increasing insanity}). A third person participant point of view would not work either. First, John, her husband and doctor, would deny that she had a serious problem, making the reader unaware of the true situation. And again, we would feel less sympathy towards the wife. Second, if the story were narrated by the housekeeper, Jane, the reader might be given a hint that the wife was going mad, but her state of mind would be uncertain until the end. In either character's case, the wallpaper would hold little significance to him or her. In seeing the story through the wife's eyes, we can see that her mental illness in "The Yellow Wallpaper" is inevitable. Between society's view of women at that time,...
