The Narrator confesses to her journal that she has seen the woman from the pattern outside her windows during the daytime. The woman creeps in the daylight along the lane, in the gardens, the arbors…everywhere! Of course she hides when a carriage comes because it would be embarrassing to be caught creeping during the daytime. The Narrator comments that she always locks the door when she does any daytime creeping herself. She can’t creep during the night because her husband would notice. She wishes he would sleep in another room because he has started acting very strangely. The woman from the pattern is always creeping during the daytime and the Narrator cannot determine if it is one woman or many because she can only look out of one window at a time. The Narrator has seen her off in the distance creeping quickly across the landscape. She states her intention to try and remove the outer pattern from the sub-pattern but won’t reveal to her journal yet the “other funny thing” she has noticed. There are two days remaining before their departure and her increasingly suspicious husband asks her more questions and she overhears him questioning his sister about his wife’s behavior. She knows that the paper is only interesting to her but she now believes that it is affecting John and Jennie.
Analysis – Entry Six
In this entry we learn that the Narrator has become the “creeper” – the women in the pattern. Like her imagination, the Narrator considers “creeping” something to be embarrassed of outside the confines of the pattern. The presence of the creeping women outside the windows and in the distance recalls the Narrator’s first seemingly innocent imaginings of people strolling in the distance. But now, instead of confidently and serenely strolling along the paths, the Narrator and the figures are trapped and must shamefully “creep” to escape. In the miasma of her delusions, the Narrator perceives that her physician/husband and sister-in-law are suspicious but she dismisses this as the ill effects of the wallpaper which she determines to pull from the walls in order to free the women trapped inside. Thus, within the confines of her imagination she has realized the power to take action (i.e. tear down the paper) and in turn care for those who have, until now, simultaneously cared for and imprisoned her.
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