The Most Sympathetic Character in The Yellow Wallpaper, The Red Convertible, and The Lottery
In the yellow wallpaper, the narrator is the character that the readers feel sad for the most. The narrator is a young wife and mother whose physician husband, john claims that she is suffering from depression. He takes her to a rest cure treatment and locks her in a nursery with 'rings and things in the walls' to ensure a good rest for her. Yet, she loses her sanity under the circumstances of John's excess suppression and the distracting yellow wallpaper in the room. John completely holds the authority over the narrator and takes care of her so careful as if she is a little girl with the nickname ‘blessed little goose’ named by him. He asks her to control herself over her imaginative and storytelling power. The narrator wants to satisfy her husband and obeys him although she 'disagrees with' his idea and has 'heavy opposition’, and she ‘takes pain to control herself’, which ‘makes me (the narrator) very tired’. Not wanting to disappoint her husband and her desire of being an ideal mother and wife, she tries hard to be lenient and thus, she suppresses her creative fantasy even with pain. The narrator becomes completely detached from the outer world when john turns down her request of living in the room ‘downstairs that opened onto the piazza and had roses all over the window’. The suppression is so unbearable that the narrator starts to write her journal in order to express her stress secretively without anybody knowing. She finds relief in writing the journal as she mentions ‘it’s such a relief!’ It proves that the suppression by john makes the narrator afraid of telling him her inner thoughts, which makes their relationship distant. In the meanwhile, the narrator knows that john loves her very much but she doesn’t like the way he loves her. As the narrator loses touch with the outer world, she stays in the room and the weird yellow wallpaper distracts her attention. By using contrast, the change in the narrator’s attitude towards the wallpaper is shown clearly.