The chief question with regard to a Freudian or really any sort of analysis would involve the meaning of the "yellow wallpaper" to the narrator. She seems to carry on a love-hate relationship with it. The paper is ugly, and it smells, and it torments her. She says she is starting to love the room in spite of it, then changes her evaluation to because of it.

Obviously she's been trapped in the room by her husband who wants to keep her in a state of weakness and helplessness. He doesn't want her to work; all he wishes she does is rest and sleep and take the tonics he gives her. The wallpaper becomes her obsession under these conditions, and the turning-point comes when she sees a woman behind the paper. The woman is imprisoned there, behind bars which the narrator sees. Then she believes there are many women trapped there. When she observes that the first woman "gets out" the woman starts "creeping in the daytime," which is something most women do not do. Eventually the narrator and the woman in the wall seem to merge into one. Of the multitude of creeping women she eventually visualizes, she asks:

I wonder if they all come out of that wall-paper, as I did.

A Freudian interpretation would probably indicate that the wallpaper is the narrator's id. This is the hidden driving force of desire behind the personality, hidden because it often is something unacceptable to society and seeks to defy societal rules and norms. It's a transgressor. The narrator is essentially imprisoned by her husband. Is she sick, either mentally or physically? We do not know. The id is in the unconscious and rebels against the narrator's being controlled and manipulated. Consciously she's in denial about her treatment by the husband. But her vision of the wallpaper has the ability to liberate her. At first she seems from her language to be the archetypal "compliant" wife, but the self-image she creates within the yellow wallpaper is one that seeks to overthrow and negate the control imposed upon her. And the fact that the one woman she sees becomes many women symbolizes that women in general are trapped, imprisoned, but now they are getting out, freeing themselves. At the end, the husband's fainting is symbolic of the narrator's finally having overcome his control over her.