Wednesday 25 September 2013

What do you think about the sudden use of the name "Jane" in the penultimate line of the story?

By the time the narrator references a person named "Jane" in the final lines of the story, she believes herself to bethe woman in the wallpaper.  The narrator also talks about the bed that will not move, peeling off as much paper as she can from the walls, and she also considers jumping out of the window.  She even references the "creeping women" she can see from her window: these are, for the most...

By the time the narrator references a person named "Jane" in the final lines of the story, she believes herself to be the woman in the wallpaper.  The narrator also talks about the bed that will not move, peeling off as much paper as she can from the walls, and she also considers jumping out of the window.  She even references the "creeping women" she can see from her window: these are, for the most part, topics she has discussed before.  However, suddenly, she ponders, "I wonder if they all come out of that wall-paper as I did?"  It seems that, as a result of having been imprisoned by her husband and kept from everyone and everything that brought her joy or stimulated her intellect, the narrator has suffered a major dissociative break in which she no longer identifies as herself.  Now, she identifies herself as the woman she has freed from the wallpaper; she has liberated this (fictitious) woman and taken on her role; this is perhaps a mechanism of her brain that allows her to finally feel free.  There has been no other mention of a "Jane": her husband is John and his sister is Jennie.  Jane must be the narrator's name, a name with which she no longer identifies herself because, in her mind, she has become the woman who was freed from the wallpaper.

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