the wallpaper is described could be compared to the ugliness of her situation. She is being oppressed by the men in her life and by her inability to break the chains of their dominance in order to escape.

As for symbolic actions, the narrator's tearing down the wallpaper in an attempt to find the "woman" in the wallpaper represents her struggle to retain or regain her sanity.  The wallpaper has been part of her confinement and by her tearing it down, she is freeing herself from that confinement.

Another symbol is the narrator's writings in her notebook and the notebook itself.  Both represent the narrator's attempt to have normalcy and sanity during this horrible ordeal of being locked in her room.  Despite being told by her husband that he wants to limit the amount of time she uses to write, she continues to write more behind his back and this is her tie to her own sanity and sense of reality (whatever her reality is at this time).  

The yellow wallpaper itself is the most obvious symbol in this story. The wallpaper represents the protagonist's mind set during this time. It further symbolizes the way women were perceived during the 19th century. The wallpaper cannot be categorized into any particular "type". It contains patterns, angles, and curves that all contradict one another, and it can be seen the same could be said for the wife's emotions during this time.

The nursery is a symbol of the way women of this time were seen as being on the same level as children. The barred windows are symbols of the confinement of women during this time with respect to the perception of what a woman's role was.

"The Yellow Wallpaper" takes place in a colonial mansion in the countryside. The narrator describes it as beautiful but isolated. Thus, she states,

it is quite alone, standing well back from the road, quite three miles from the village.

This detail is important, given just how critical the theme of isolation is within the story, with its main character, who is already depressed, finding herself further isolated within the house. However, even within the isolation of the house, it is important to note that most of the story is set within an even more confined space: the nursery, which contains the yellow wallpaper that the main character both detests and fixates on.

These details of physical setting are critical in shaping the themes and plot of the story, given its deeply psychological undertones (undertones that are tied closely with its feminist criticisms). One can observe a sense of chauvinism in the husband's treatment of his wife. He neither listens to nor respects her own subjective experiences concerning her own psychological state; he confines her to this house, appealing to his medical expertise when stating that it is for her own good. Thus, while the husband spends much of his time at his profession as a doctor, his wife finds herself stewing in her isolation and depression, deteriorating further and further over time. With that in mind, this sense of physical space (represented within the house and the room) is a critical component to the story, given these themes of isolation and confinement and their effect on one's psychological state.

Interestingly, the unnamed narrator of Gilman's "The Yellow Wallppaper" begins her narrative with this description of the house that is her medical retreat,

A colonial mansion, a hereditary estate, I would say a haunted house....

Further, she describes,

It is quite alone, quite three miles from the village, standing well back from the road, ...there are hedges and walls and gates that lock, and lots of separate little houses for gardeners and people.

Clearly, the setting holds much significance as it indicates the isolation to which the woman will soon be subjected, as well as a sense of imprisonment. The narrator herself is prescient as she feels "something strange" about the place in addition to her dislike for her room.  She prefers one downstairs that has lovely chintz curtains with roses all over the window and a door that opens onto the piazza; however, her husband John confines her to an upstairs room that has bars on the windows and a "repellent" and "smouldering unclean yellow" wallpaper which she claims is the worst she has ever seen.  It is, she observes ,

One of those sprawling flamboyant patterns committing every artistic sin....[It] commit[s] every artistic sin....

At first repulsed aesthetically by the design and color of the wallpaper, the unnerved narrator, left to "rest" by herself, finds little else to focus upon than this paper that is hideous to her. And, with the narrator's internalizations upon her mental and physical state, she begins significantly to project her inner feelings onto the paper.  In an eerie foreshadowing of the final crisis, the narrator describes the paper with continuing prescience,

It is dull enough to confuse the eye in following, pronounced enough to constantly irritate and provoke study, and when you follow the lame uncertain curves for a little distance they suddenly commit suicide--plunge off at outrageous angles, destroy themselves in unheard of contradictions.

This hideous paper becomes for the narrator symbolic as she envisions a woman who, like herself, must hide and creep behind the "patterns" of the Victorian femme covert laws that suppress wives. In her effort to free herself from her repression and depression, the narrator tries to free the envisioned woman who is in need of rescue.  But, in this effort, the narrator sacrifices her own identity.  For, while she has unraveled the pattern of her life in unraveling the paper, she has sacrificed her own personal identity. For, after her husband retrieves the key and opens the room, he sees his wife continuing her "creeping" on the floor:

"I've got out at last," said I, "in spite of you and Jane. And I've pulled off most of the paper, so you can't put me back!"

Now, the narrator perceives herself as the woman trapped behind the paper and her former being is "Jane."  As in her prescient remark, the woman has committed a suicide of her personality [Jane, which is her name] "plunging off at outrageous angles," and destroyed her own identity in the "unheard of contradiction" of becoming the woman freed from the repressive patterns of Victorian womanhood.

The yellow wallpaper is, indeed, significant in the narrator's journey from repression to independence.  But, the cost has been "uncertain" and "at outrageous angles," so much so that the narrator is disassociated from her true self in a suicide of her mind that leaves her, like the house, "quite alone" and in "a separate house" from her husband and others.

The yellow wallpaper becomes symbolic of the narrator's mental state as she progresses through the story. At first, she loathes it, just as she loathes her confinement and tries to suppress her anger at her husband, John, who is responsible for it. She tries to understand the wallpaper's design and describes the paper in such a way as to give us a clue to her intelligence.

Looked at in one way each breadth stands alone, the bloated curves and flourishes—a kind of “debased Romanesque” with delirium tremens—go waddling up and down in isolated columns of fatuity. But, on the other hand, they connect diagonally, and the sprawling outlines run off in great slanting waves of optic horror, like a lot of wallowing seaweeds in full chase.

The wallpaper begins to provide intellectual stimulation that she otherwise lacks, and so she begins to fixate on it and to think that she is growing fonder of her room and even more healthy, "because of the wallpaper." Eventually, she begins to imagine that a woman is trapped inside the wallpaper (as she, in many ways, is trapped within it), and she makes it her goal to free that woman.

Once she succeeds in tearing down the paper, thereby freeing the trapped woman, she loses all sense of her own identity and begins to think of herself as the now-freed woman who has come out of the wallpaper. Unable to obtain freedom for herself, she invents a fellow prisoner and then takes on her fictitious identity in order to obtain a kind of mental freedom. The wallpaper becomes the motif through which all this can transpire.

In terms of the meaning of the story, we see—through the narrator's experiences—the significant toll taken on a female patient when her concerns and ideas about her own health are not taken seriously. The narrator is not allowed to have any say in her own treatment, and her feelings are disregarded by her husband, her brother, and what seems to be the entire medical establishment; she is condescended to and infantilized rather than treated as an intelligent adult.

As a result, her mental health rapidly declines, and she ends up far more ill than she was to begin with. Therefore, one of the main themes of this text is that the ailments of female patients must be taken seriously and that their ideas should not be discounted when it comes to their treatment.

The Yellow Wallpaper is a classic gothic horror story by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, and mainly concerns the slow progress of mental illness.

The protagonist, who is never named, is suffering from post-partum depression upon the birth of a child, and is prescribed strict best-rest by a doctor. In the setting, this is considered completely reasonable, and she is prohibited from any activity, even non-strenuous ones such as reading. With no other mental stimulation, she creates a trapped woman in the yellow wallpaper, eventually trapping herself in madness.

The yellow wallpaper is significant because yellow is often considered the color of sickness or malaise. Ancient medicine colored the "humors" of the body; the Choleric humor was yellow bile, representing fire, or a creative, passionate, unstable mentality. The protagonist is certainly unstable, and her creativity shows in her belief that the wallpaper hides a trapped woman (which is itself an unsubtle echo of her own imprisonment). She mentions the "smell" of yellow pervading the house, which brings to mind mold or mildew, which in an unventilated home could cause a fungal infection; even the thought of a "yellow smell" is repugnant. Finally, the symbolic association of cowardice with the color yellow could be a condemnation of the woman's refusal to fight against the oppressive patriarchal society which has imprisoned her, instead becoming "yellow" and retreating into madness and submission.

If one employs the one denotation of haunt, to intrude upon continually as an idea "haunts" a person's mind, then readers may certainly perceive the narrator of Gilman's "The Yellow Wallpaper" as haunted by the sickening yellow paper on the walls of her confinement, a wallpaper that seems to take on expression and give perverse form to itself in its asymmetry.

This wallpaper, in its haunting presence for Gilman's narrator, seems "a strange, provoking, formless sort of figure, that seems to skulk about behind that sill and conspicuous front design."  To the narrator, therefore, the figure that she perceives--whether it be real or in her mind--assumes the characteristics of a veritable ghost as it becomes 

like a woman stooping down and creeping about behind that pattern.  I don't like it a bit.  I wonder--I begin to think--I wish John would take me away from here! 

I am sure other editors might disagree with me but I don't actually think this story has much to do with "haunting" in the traditional oh-no-there's-a-ghost-behind-you kind of way. The principle theme of this incredible short story is one woman's account of her own mental condition and how this spirals down and down until she reaches a point of complete insanity. We need to be aware of the way in which the female narrator is unreliable, and we need to see how she projects her feelings of despair, entrapment and anger in the curious yellow wallpaper in her room.

Note how as the narrative progresses she sees a woman in the wallpaper, who moves around and "shakes" the bars of the yellow wallpaper:

The front pattern does move--and no wonder! The woman behind shakes it!

...Then in the very bright spots she keeps still, and in the very shady spots she just takes hold of the bars and shakes them hard.

And she is all the time trying to climb through. But nobody could climb through that pattern--it strangles so; I think that is why it has so many heads.

What we come to realise is that this woman that she sees in the wallpaper is her own intellectual and emotional self that is "trapped" and "encaged." Although her husband means well and is following the orders of the doctor, she is not allowed to escape or to express herself, and thus she eventually gives in to insanity.

Thus whilst there is a supernatural presence in the wallpaper, we can identify that it represents the anger and rage of the narrator who is forced to lie in silence on a bed in this room, imprisoned and encaged just as surely as the woman that she sees raging so strongly against her captivity.

In "The Yellow Wallpaper," the unnamed woman narrating the short story is virtually a prisoner in a small yellow room with horrendous yellow wallpaper. She is staying at this small summer house with her husband, newborn baby, and sister in an attempt to get some rest and recouperate from her post-partum depression. She is not allowed to see her baby, read, write, or do anything that may strain her, so out of boredom, she resorts to studying the hideous yellow wallpaper.

After weeks of meticulous observation, she starts to see eyes peering our from the paper, staring at her. She believes that the paper knows her better than anyone else. Finally, she sees the form of a woman hiding in the pattern. The narrator notices that the pattern is double, bars in front and an intricate display behind. The woman is behind the bars and is shaking them, trying to get out. Full of empathy, the narrator locks herself in the room and desperately tries to get the woman out by ripping the paper.

Because the woman in the yellow paper is trapped and alone, she symbolizes the narrator in her incarceration. Both women are trying to escape their "jail" unsuccessfully. The woman in the wallpaper is behind bars, unable to be heard. The narrator's prison is both physical and intellectual, as her husband controls her actions and words. He undermines her in every way and trivializes her fears and desires.

In 1913 Charlotte Perkins Gilman published, "Why I Wrote 'The Yellow Wallpaper,'" explaining that she herself had suffered for years from nervous problems that led to melancholia. After she had suffered for three years, she went to a noted specialist in nervous diseases who prescribed the "rest cure." Since she was physically healthy, her body responded to the rest and she was sent home with instructions to "live as domestic a life as possible" and to only have two hours of "intelligent life" a day.

Ms. Gilman embraced the new feminist movement that supported more independence and broader roles outside the home, roles that could exercise a woman's spirit and give her increased, not less "iintelligent life." Very avant-garde, Mis Gilman believed that women should be financially independent from men; she even promoted the idea that men and women should share domestic work--a most radical concept for the late 1800s. Her story, a testimony to her beliefs, caused some social furor at the time that it was published.

Charlotte Perkins Gilman's famous story, "The Yellow Wallpaper," is quite reflective of the time in which it was written. The protagonist is cloistered in a room that she abhors. She longs to go outside, yet she is forced to remain inside because of her suppossed declining health. There is evidence in the story that it is her imprisonment that causes her sickness, though her husband does not allow her to see it. These details paint a picture all too common of the era that Gilman lived in - women who were expected to answer to their husbands, regardless of how intelligent or unhappy they may be. This story helped to pull the veil back on this kind of treatment toward women.

I am sure I am not alone in finding the ending of this excellent tale to be rather disturbing in the way it represents a compelete abandonment to the madness and lunacy that we see the narrator has been sliding towards throughout the story. The way that the narrator explicitly identifies herself as the woman that she has seen trapped behind the "bars" of the yellow wallpaper is made clear by her action of circling the room, following the wallpaper round and round. She, just like the woman she has seen behind the wallpaper, is trapped inside the endless maze of her own lunacy, and even the presence of her husband's body in the way of her course does not impede her movements. Note what she says to her husband and how she responds to his fainting:

"I've got out at last," said I, "in spite of you and Jane! And I've pulled off most of the paper, so you can't put me back!"

Now why should that man have fainted? But he did, and right across my path by the wall, so that I had to creep over him every time!

The narrator's lack of self-awareness and empathy is shown by her questioning why her husband should have fainted. What to her makes perfect sense is only greeted by horror and stunned amazement by her husband as he faints. The move of the narrator from being sane to insane is complete, and is marked by the narrator becoming the woman behind the wallpaper that she has imagined throughout the story.

The value in this short story is that it interprets Silas Weir Mitchell's rest cure treatment for postpartum depression and other "nervous" disorders from the point of view of a woman who was actually subjected to it.

Mitchell was a real person and his theories on dealing with patients suffering from what we would today call mental illness were widely influential in the real world at around the turn of the century and for some decades beyond. For example, Virginia Woolf was subjected to the rest cure treatment when she had nervous breakdowns.

Woolf critiques this form of treatment in her novel Mrs. Dalloway, when shell-shocked Septimus Smith commits suicide rather than be subjected to a rest cure in an institution. Gilman also critiques this treatment, which deprived patients of any intellectual outlets or interests, as a cruel punishment that only made any depression or mental illness worse.

Gilman shows the narrator disintegrating and becoming more profoundly mentally ill under this "cure" than she was before it started. Women's voices about what they need should be heard, not ignored by men trying to determine what is "best" for them without their input. Gilman's story is important because it provides a compelling and persuasive critique of the horror of mental health care in her period.

'The Yellow Wallpaper' is an important and valuable text in several ways. It deals with important issues - the treatment of women and mental illness in society, based upon Gilman's own experience of post-natal depression - and it does so in a striking manner, employing the style of psychological horror. Indeed, this approach led it initially to be regarded as little more than horror in the tradition of Edgar Allan Poe, but subsequently it has come to be recognised as a seminal social and feminist text in its depiction of a woman whose mental breakdown is worsened by the medical treatment foisted upon her by her male carers.

In the time in which the story was written, women were often diagnosed vaguely with hysteria and condemned to a rest-cure which, as Gilman knew from her own experiences, often worsened the problem. Confined to her bed, forbidden to do anything so taxing as writing - something she herself realises would be therapeutic for her - the narrator almost literally goes out of her mind with boredom.

As this character narrates her own story, she is able to directly communicate her thoughts and feelings to the reader, in a style that is at once monotonous and agitated. We, as readers, are able to sympathise directly with her, and that makes us more involved in the story and the issues that it raises.

The story also makes effective use of imagery with the yellow wallpaper which becomes a sinister symbol of the narrator's mental problems and her feeling of entrapment:

The colour is repellant, almost revolting; a smouldering unclean yellow, strangely faded by the slow-turning sunlight. It is a dull yet lurid orange in some places, a sickly sulphur tint in others.

This grim description conveys the narrator's own sense of sickness, and even hellishness, with the reference to the 'sulphur tint'. With the use of such sophisticated literary techniques, the story leaves a lasting impression on the reader. It deals with important social issues in a memorable way and that is its enduring value. 

The primary symbol in the story is, unsurprisingly, the wallpaper itself. The wallpaper starts out in the story as something slightly off or irksomely unappealing. It is perhaps due to this aspect of it that the narrator, already in a seemingly fragile mental state, fixates on it in her isolation and thinks of it as something that she must unravel and understand.

The pattern of the wallpaper is formless. Hour after hour, she puzzles over it, until she begins to see an illusory second pattern in the negative space—a pattern that she eventually recognizes as a woman that seems desperate to escape.

This is the true nature of the symbolism of the wallpaper. It represents the prison of family, societal conditioning, and culture that imprisons women who deviate from the norm even slightly. The prison has no concern for the narrator's actual well-being, only how suited she is for public appearance. It is because of this, perhaps, that the narrator feels compelled to tear it apart.

In "The Yellow Wallpaper" by Charlotte Perkins Gilman symbolism permeates the atmosphere, setting, and even the mood of the main character, mainly due to the fact that the woman has no other option but to transfer her disparate thoughts and emotions onto objects. This is, perhaps, the only way that she can make sense of her current situation. 

It is arguable that the first symbol that we see is the isolated estate to which she is taken. A big house separated from the rest of civilization, basically, is symbolic of how her own issue, as big as it is, has been just removed to a separate place- but has not been resolved. 

The central symbol, which is the yellow wallpaper, is described under a very negative light

it is dull enough to confuse the eye in following, pronounced enough to constantly irritate and provoke study, and when you follow the lame uncertain curves for a little distance they suddenly commit suicide--plunge off at outrageous angles, destroy themselves in unheard of contradictions.

Here we already see the first signs of how the woman personifies the patterns on the paper in a way that reflects her own state of mind. Words such as "uncertain", "destroy", "suicide", "contradictions", are present in her subconscious, and the paper is slowly leading her to open up to her true emotions. 

Then, there is the color. Although the actual color yellow may or may not have a specific meaning, we could argue that in different types of literature it has meant different things. We could say that it is the color of cowardice, or the color of the "cheap" (as in the 1890's coined term "yellow press", or "dime a dozen"). One thing is for sure: the paper is ugly. It makes her feel oppressed that this is what is important about it.

The color is repellent, almost revolting; a smouldering unclean yellow, strangely faded by the slow-turning sunlight.It is a dull yet lurid orange in some places, a sickly sulphur tint in others.

Here we see more words: sulphur (related to the smell of evil), "revolting", "unclean" and, most importantly, "dull". Such are her emotions regarding the paper which, again, is nothing but a transference of emotions from her mind onto objects.

The slow progression of her depression will end up in her tearing up the yellow wallpaper in order to liberate the woman who she believes is trapped behind. Obviously, this is another clear reference to her own situation, where she has been removed from a comfort zone and placed in what is nothing short of an experimental room; all in aims to calm her nerves after giving birth. Hence, the paper is the biggest symbolism in the story because it literally mirrors her state of mind.