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What Happens At The End Of The Yellow Wallpaper

The climax of 'The Yellow Wallpaper' and the narrator's final act leave me debating her fate and the feminist symbolism.
2025-08-01 16:07:52
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6 Answers

Best Answer
Care4U
Care4U
This is intentionally ambiguous at the end. The narrator believes she has destroyed the woman in the wallpaper. However she is now completely identified with her and has descending into madness. Her husband faints at the sight of her. I explored another scenario where a woman is pushed to a dramatic and pivotal act through psychological pressure and the confines of society in ‘The Revenge of the Mute Wife’. For years the mute wife has been silenced and controlled by her husband and sons. But she has been planning her revenge for a long time and in great detail. Her perceived weakness turns out to be her greatest weapon against them.
2026-07-30
Holden
Holden
In the end of the story the narrator has completely lost herself in her delusions. She has locked herself in the room and stripped the wallpaper from the walls. She is crawling up the walls in the room believing that she is the woman that she had seen in the wallpaper. Her husband comes into the room and faints but she crawls all over his unconscious body obsessed with the new ‘freedom’ that she has discovered. The story ends on a dark and somber note and the narrators mental collapse is portrayed as both her escape from her oppression and her imprisonment in her own madness. The yellow wallpaper, which had at first seemed an ugly feature of the room to the narrator, had become a symbol of her silenced voice and her deteriorating mind as no one had listened to her.
2025-08-02
Felix
Felix
The ending of ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’ is as powerful and haunting a descent into madness as any reader is likely to come across. When the narrator of the story finally tears down the yellow wallpaper, she believes that she has freed from it a trapped woman. But in a realization as chilling as any in literature, it becomes clear that there was no other woman in the wallpaper – all the time the narrator has been seeing the reflection of her own emanating from the yellow wallpaper. Her own suppressed identity.

What is most impactful about the ending is the ambiguity of the situation as it exists for the reader. Is this character finally free from her suppressors or is she completely unraveling? The wallpaper is the character’s mind and the more she peels away at it the more she unravels. Her identification with the creeping woman behind the pattern is also a strong identification with her repressed self. His fainting at her crawling is the death blow to his attempts to control her. In the end she is left to her own devices in a world that she has created. The story does not end, it haunts the reader and leaves many questions about the character’s newfound “freedom”.
2025-08-07
A Terrell Merritt
A Terrell Merritt
There's a real sense of practical detail in the horror here. The heroine remembers to tell John where he's put the key. She notices the smell of the paper. She's meticulous about the tearing of it into pieces. Her subsequent madness is, instead of being presented in some kind of overly-poetic or even romantically inspired way, completely and systematically grounded in her situation. Locking the door, tearing up the paper, her ‘creeping’ about: all of these are presented in the most mundane way possible. John’s faint is treated with about the same amount of interest as a ringing phone might be in another story. The end of the story is a rather bleak and anti-climactic denial of any kind of catharsis for the heroine. Her freedom is a small, cramped space: a circle on the floor. She has won and he lies unconscious. That is all.
2026-08-01
The Wanderer
The Wanderer
It's a downer, for sure. No last-minute rescue, no moment of clarity. The whole scenario goes downhill in a very bad way. The way the wife, Jane, refers to herself in the third person when she's taunting John in the early part of the story is a good indication of how far she's fallen. Her creeping in the late part of the story is a very specific and very awful detail. The way she's creeping, as opposed to running or fighting, is a very shameful, almost animalistic way for her to be moving. The full extent of her downfall is shown in this story. John fainting is probably the closest thing to consequence that John receives in this piece, and it's a very powerful scene. The way he faints at the sight of the ruin of his wife is just very powerful. And she just... goes over him. He's just a log on a path that she's now able to navigate through in her newly downtrodden life. He's no longer her husband. He's just an obstacle to her in her new world of patterns and behaviors. The story is a very empty, very horrible tale that leaves you with no sense of closure or lessons learned by John, and no hope for recovery by his wife. She's in that room forever, even if she and John leave the room.
2026-08-06

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