Literary elements by which the author conveys the narrator’s attitude toward the setting include first-person narration, imagery, alliteration, and personification.

By using a first-person narrator, Charlotte Perkins Gilman convinces the reader of the narrator’s strong feelings toward the overall setting of the summer retreat and, especially, her room. This connection helps establish the severity of the narrator’s subsequent reaction to the room, which seems to trigger a mental breakdown.

Early in the story, the narrator refers to the house as “haunted” and offers her sensations that support this idea; these are starkly contrasted with the impressions held by her husband, John. Her sensations include “something queer,” “ghostliness,” and “something strange.” She also says of her room, “I don’t like it one bit.” John, she tells the reader, is horrified by “superstition.” As she describes the house and surrounding property, many of the images pertain to the garden vegetation. Her mention of the “long grape-covered arbors” foreshadows her obsession with the vine patterns of her room.

As she turns to describing the room itself, the idea of strangeness gives way to unpleasantness. Her images invoke illness. The sinuous quality of the vine pattern is emphasized through alliteration, the repetition of initial consonant sounds. She uses s in numerous words, thus emphasizing the “sickly” quality she perceives.

The color is repellent, almost revolting; a smouldering unclean yellow, strangely faded by the slow-turning sunlight.

Personification is the assignment of human attributes to animals, inanimate objects, or abstract ideas. Her use of personification connects the room’s unhealthy condition with her own. She says the designs commits an “artistic sin” and then that the “lame uncertain curves” of the vine pattern “commit suicide.”