"The Yellow Wallpaper"

I just finished Charlotte Perkins Gillman's "The Yellow Wallpaper," and I am reminded that I can never quite decide what I think about this story. So here I am, maddly prepping for this afternoon's class, thinking obsessively about the story, scanning critical stuff. And I'm realizing, not for the first time, that maybe my problem is that, like the narrator seems to be here, I allow myself to become trapped within my own mind, my own emotional problems. I can say this because I just finished a particularly anxiety-ridden weekend. (Was that the right word? "Ridden"?) And I know that, at least in part, my anxiety comes from thinking obsessively about my own mental and emotional state. And if only I'd do something outside myself, something creative, as the narrator in Gillman's story desires initially, I'd get away from that anxiety. Only, it's so hard to do. For me, anxiety becomes so overwhelming that I really believe, in the moment, that I can't break away from it, that I can't actually focus on and do anything else. And so, like our narrator, I attempt to strip away the prison of anxiety that binds me, only to find that I'm simply emprisioning my self more tightly.

Ok, so I know that this isn't some super smart response. It's just that I needed a space to work through this story, at least a little. And you know, women and sickness and hysteria and emobdiment--all these things seem important to me lately.