Analysis of The Yellow Wallpaper

The woman’s husband treats her like a child. As we move away from whomever or whatever has raised us, we begin to savor our sovereignty, but also realize that now we still have to answer to someone. We can lose our minds if we become too involved in these escapes; just as the narrator lost her mind. She sees the pattern on the wallpaper as bars behind which a woman is imprisoned: At night…it becomes bars. The woman in this story was truly sick, but I don’t feel it was the yellow wallpaper that led her to insanity. ” I think that Gilman intentionally made the room a nursery to even further show this.

The wallpaper is symbolic of the state of mind of the narrator. We are never entirely free, that is until we are dead (or at least dead to this world). If we are to escape control in our lives do we have to go mad?

. The restraints within the nursery, such as the barred windows and “rings and things in the walls” [2] are symbolic of the fact that the narrator is a prisoner in her own home: she is forced to rest herself and is “absolutely forbidden to ‘work’” [3] until she is well again.

Imprisonment, tyranny and subjugation brings about the narrator’s mental breakdown and the dominating feature of the room represents the narrator’s state of mind as she looses her grip on reality. The woman is eventually forced into a prison within her own mind. She eventually escaped the shackles of her husband, and was now controlled by her own insanity. The room where the narrator has to spend her time is symbolic of the conditions that eventually make her lose her mind, and the most dominant feature in the room is the yellow wallpaper with its “torturing” [1] pattern.