The word "yellow" never really has a positive connotation in this story. The narrator describes the wallpaper as a "smouldering, unclean yellow" that revolts her. Yellow is sometimes associated with happiness (think of smiley-faces) or joy or life (like the sun), but the narrator seems to associate it with disease and decay instead. She says the paper has a "sickly sulphur tint," adding to this very negative, diseased connotation. Later in the story, she still feels this way, connecting the color to "all of the yellow things [she] ever saw -- not beautiful ones like buttercups, but old foul, bad yellow things."

The word "creeping" is never really positive in the story either. The narrator describes the woman she thinks she sees "creeping" outside. She marvels because "most women do not creep by daylight." However, later, she tells us that she "always lock[s] the door when [she] creep[s] by daylight." Her admission that she engages in "creeping" now is very troubling and even more ominous. Her later revelation that there are "so many of those creeping women" outside makes things more and more eerie via its negative and strange connotation. The "immovable bed" is only mentioned once, but it also has a strange connotation since there is no normal reason for a bed to be nailed down.

Finally, when the narrator begins to describe the "outside pattern" of the wallpaper, it is alarming because she talks about shapes behind that outside pattern that seem clearer and clearer to her. Later, she describes it as "florid" and says that it reminds her of a "fungus," like a "string of toadstools"; none of these words have positive or clean or healthy connotations. Finally, she believes that she sees a woman behind the "outside pattern" and this woman needs to be freed; it's as if the "outside pattern" now connotes the narrator's own lack of freedom.