The narrator of "The Yellow Wallpaper" imagines or creates a scenario that is emblematic of gender issues as they existed at the time (the late-nineteenth century). In analyzing this excerpt, we need to understand what the wallpaper and the phantom women symbolize. In my view, the narrator's intention is a metaphor of the constricted social rules women were made to abide by. The "women" she describes are trapped, though they seem also to have been liberating themselves by emerging from this symbolic prison. The narrator fears them and also fears what their escape implies; hence, her...

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