I have reread, trying to be as open to it as possible. When I found myself getting angry at the narrator, I'd read the section again. I told myself not to believe the narrator. I began questioning her. Why at first was the wallpaper only torn away above the bed? Because that was as far as she could reach?
She (Jenne) didn't know I was in the room, and when I asked her in a quiet, a very quiet voice, with the most restrained manner possible, what she was doing with the paper--she turned around as if she had been caught stealing, and looked quite angry-- asked me why I should frighten her so!
Whom should the reader believe about "how" the narrator asked the question? No longer believing the narrator, I'll take Jenne's version and can "see" a deranged woman screaming about her wallpaper.
At all times I tried to picture what the room would look like, especially when John sees it--and her--at the end and faints. Wonderful image at that point--her creeping and looking back at him over her shoulder, the wallpaper destroyed, the bed gnawed.
I revise my theory of a happy ending because the woman is out from behind the wallpaper prison. Yes, she's out. And she's creeping back and forth across her husband's body. No way that falls anywhere near happy.
I appreciated the story far more this time. I still dislike the narrator, mostly because of her self-image. John tells her she's getting better, so she must be. Damn all the evidence to the contrary! So why am I reacting so negatively to that aspect of her? Because I see her in myself? After all, I'm capable of letting a doctor's refusal of a therapy dump me into Scrooge's "surplus population." I've read--no, I don't have a source--that what we dislike in others is often what we can't face in ourselves. Guess that could also be true of reactions to characters.
Another thing I "brought" to the story is one aspect of a relationship I have with a friend. He is in many, many ways a good friend, but the problem I have is he suffers from depression. (Okay. It's his problem, too.) A conversation will slide onto that subject, and--practical me--I'll offer suggestions. But he has the last word in every discussion because he'll say that I don't understand. Part of his depression is that he doesn't want to deal successfully with it. He's right. I DON'T UNDERSTAND. You deal with what's dealt. You follow your dreams. I think part of my dislike the first time I read the story was seeing that friend in the narrator.
Whatever. I'm glad I read it again.
