For example, the narrator describes detecting a figure ‘like a woman stooping down and creeping about behind that pattern.’ This one is more firmly focused on the story’s feminist message, and sees the shapes in the wallpaper as symbols of female oppression at the time the story was written.

However, given the kinds of shapes the narrator describes seeing in the wallpaper, a second interpretation is possible. This closely ties the paper’s patterns with the narrator’s shifting moods and highlights the subjective nature of what she sees (or thinks she sees) in the wallpaper. Human beings have evolved to look for patterns as a survival mechanism, but here the narrator’s pattern-hunting is her undoing.Īt one point, she mentions a ‘particularly irritating’ pattern which ‘you can only see it in certain lights, and not clearly then’. Her disordered mental state leads her to see all manner of figures in the paper’s patterns. The first interpretation views the yellow wallpaper as an outward and visible symbol of the narrator’s own internal state of mind. But it is also, perhaps, the most ambiguous symbol in the story, because it can invite at least two very different interpretations. The most powerful symbol in the story is the yellow wallpaper itself. The reference to a gymnasium is ironic, since a gymnasium is a room for exercise, but the room actually worsens the narrator’s health.

The room thus symbolises the narrator’s own childlike state as she is treated like a naughty child by her husband and locked away in her room. The fact that the room was once a nursery and then, the narrator deduces, a ‘gymnasium’ is loaded with significance. The narrator tells us that there are bars on the windows to protect little children from hurting themselves, although ‘bars’ here also symbolise the narrator’s de facto imprisonment in the room. It is significant that the room in which the narrator is incarcerated is the old nursery in the large house.

The yellow wallpaper setting