disagree with their ideas.Personally, I believe that congenial work, with excitement and change, would do me good.

I don't know why I should write this. I don't want to. I don't feel able.

3) Parenthesis: this is a scheme of word order that veers from the traditional structure. Interjections of the author's voice appeal to our pity; we are given a glimpse into her mental suffering and emotional anguish. Below, we almost hear her desperation at being labeled 'hysterical.' She is also suspicious of the house and how her stay there will affect her.

If a physician of high standing, and one's own husband, assures friends and relatives that there is really nothing the matter with one but temporary nervous depression—a slight hysterical tendency—what is one to do?

I am afraid, but I don't care—there is something strange about the house—I can feel it.

4) Parallelism: this is a scheme of balance. It presents a similar structure in terms of phrasing and clause construction. It contributes to the rhythm in sentences and it also emphasizes similarities. This short story has many examples of parallelisms.

It slaps you in the face, knocks you down, and tramples upon you.

There is nothing so dangerous, so fascinating, to a temperament like yours.

The color is hideous enough, and unreliable enough, and infuriating enough, but the pattern is torturing. (this is a tricolon, a type of isocolon. Isocolons are a type of parallelism. Isocolons are not only similar in structure, they are also similar in length).

Hope this helps!

This story uses many literary devices in order to be effective. Firstly, its narrative style is a first person stream on consciousness. This style makes the protagonist seem unbalanced, diluted, and confused.

The story also contains several symbols. The yellow wallpaper itself symbolizes the psychological state of the narrator. The nursery is also a symbol of society's treatment of women as juveniles. The barred windows symbolize entrapment, or the prison of the room or mind. 

In Charlotte Perkins Gilman's short story, "The Yellow Wallpaper," two literary devices she uses to develop the central idea are style and characterization. Style is defined as...

...manner of expression; how a speaker or writer says what he says.

In this story, the narrator tells her story in a series of writings constructed in secret. She has conversations where she describes what goes on around her and how she feels. At first the narrator sounds quite grounded. The concerns she has with regard to recovering her health are brushed aside as unimportant by her husband (the doctor), and she takes this all in stride, often responding with a rhetorical:

But what is one to do?

Her stoic attitude changes dramatically as she becomes more mentally unsound: since her husband does not believe that she is ill at all, we can only learn of the narrator's decline through her writing. When she wants to remove the wallpaper, her husband decides to leave it up:

At first he meant to repaper the room, but afterward he said that I was letting it get the better of me, and that nothing was worse for a nervous patient than to give way to such fancies.

John thinks he has all the answers—the reader has been able to follow the narrator's progress all along. She is never aggressive, but begins to lose touch with the world as it is: the yellow wallpaper is at the heart of her problem.

At one point, she describes:

There is a recurrent spot where the pattern lolls like a broken neck and two bulbous eyes stare at you upside down.

Another clear indication that the narrator is losing her grasp on reality is found in the following:

I never thought of it before, but it is lucky that John kept me here after all; I can stand it so much easier than a baby, you see.

Of course I never mention it to them any more—I am too wise—but I keep watch for it all the same.

As the story progresses, and the narrator becomes more obsessed by the wallpaper, and her connection to those around her deteriorates to the point that no one else in the house would know her anymore. She sees things that are not real.

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

Sometimes I think there are a great many women behind, and sometimes only one, and she crawls around fast, and her crawling shakes it all over.

When his wife locks the door to her room and throws the key outside into the bushes, John has to get it to open her door. When he enters, there is his wife, creeping along the wallpaper. She believes that she is the woman trapped behind the paper and is allowed to come out at night to creep around. When John sees his wife, he faints dead away.

It is the style Gilmer adopts that take the audience through the various stages in mental illness. The second literary device used is characterization, described as...

...the way an author presents characters. In direct presentation, a character is described by the author, the narrator or the other characters. In indirect presentation, a character's traits are revealed by action and speech.

In this story, the narrator's character traits are revealed by what she does and says: this is indirect presenation. As shown above in the style the author uses, we also see the characterization of the narrator. She tries not to be difficult, appreciates Mary's help with the baby, but loses herself to the woman she comes to believe is trapped behind the wallpaper. Her actions show us that she suffers from mental illness.

Considered a story of psychological realism, "The Yellow Wallpaper" depicts a woman from the Victorian Age who suffers from post-partum depression as well as the stultifying control of her husband under the femme covert laws.  In addition, Gilman depicts the unreasonable treatment of post-partum depression of the era, a treatment to which the unnamed narrator is subjected.

Here are some of the terms associated with the historical context of this story:

femme covert laws  - under these laws, husbands had complete dominion over their wives' property. In fact, wives had no direct legal control over their earnings, children, or belongings.  That the narrator is conditioned to accept this law is evidenced in her words,

He [the protagonist's husband] is very careful and loving, and hardly let me stir without special direction.

She also remarks,

If a physician of high standing, and one's own husband, assures friends and relatives that there is really nothing the matter with one but temporary nervous depression--a slight hysterical tendency--what is one to do? 

2. nervous depression, also known as"a slight hysterical tendency" is what neurologist S. Weir Mitchell, who prescribed his

3. rest-cure: complete bed rest and limited intellectual activity, are terms relative to post-partum depression that are used by Dr. Mitchell.

4. nervous troubles is another term that applies to post-partum depression. 

5. phosphates and tonics are prescribed for the "troubles" associated with the nervous system.  The unnamed protagonist comments that these"nervous troubles are dreadfully depressing," indicating that she correctly self-diagnoses.

First, and most simply, we have a protagonist, an antagonist, and a conflict in this story: these are all conventions. The protagonist is the narrator, a woman who has recently had a baby. We might be tempted to view her husband, John, as the antagonist, because he's the one responsible for keeping her in isolation, but that would mean her conflict is only with him, and that's not the case. Really, the narrator's conflict is with all of society and its expectations and treatment of women.

The medical diagnosis of "hysteria"—the disease doctors suggest is affecting the narrator —was vague and diffuse: a catch-all for any time a woman was "overly emotional" or not behaving in a socially acceptable way toward her husband and/or child. In reality, it seems like the narrator has postpartum depression: she talks about her anxiety and feeling that she cannot care properly for her son.  The fact that her husband is a doctor and that another, real-life doctor at the time, Weir Mitchell, is mentioned helps us to locate society as the antagonist. Isolating the narrator from all social interaction or anything that might cause her to become to anxious or stimulated and even keeping her in bed all the time would be common "cures" for "hysteria." Often, women treated in these ways would simply pretend to be better in order to avoid further "treatment," which gave the "treatment" the appearance of working. At any rate, then, the conflict here is one of Character vs. Society.

Second, this story relies a great deal on dramatic irony. Dramatic irony occurs when the audience knows more than a character, and this is a great way to build tension in a text: if we know something the character doesn't, we can often see the writing on the wall, so to speak, before they do. This is what happens in this story. We get clues that the narrator's mental health is declining in a way she does not seem aware of and even that the room she stays in was definitely not for children. She mentions bars on the windows, "rings and things" in the wall (which, frankly, sound like a restraining device), and the fact that the bed is tied down.

The narrator's obsession with the yellow wallpaper is probably the biggest clue: when she begins to think it is alive, that it has intention, this should put us on our guard. We know she is deteriorating, even if she doesn't, and though her husband seems aware of it to an extent, he certainly does not understand how deeply mentally ill she has become. This dramatic irony leads to a catharsis, another convention where all the tension is finally purged as the truth comes out. In the end, when the narrator comes to believe that she is the woman who was trapped in the wallpaper and has escaped, her husband learns the true extent of her illness, and the audience experiences catharsis when all the tension of knowing more than he does is released.

At the beginning of “The Yellow Wallpaper,” the narrator explains the house in which she and her husband, who is also her doctor, are living; she talks about her “nervous condition” and the treatment she is receiving under his care. She also explains what is typical of their marriage, how she feels, what she is allowed and not allowed to do, and how much she loathes the wallpaper in her room. This is an example of exposition, the presentation of information that can be helpful to the reader in order to understand the characters, setting, and conflict.

However, the rising action begins when the narrator’s feelings about the wallpaper begin to change. She says, “I’m getting really fond of the room in spite of the wallpaper. Perhaps because of the wallpaper.” At this point, tension begins to build toward the climax, or the moment of most tension: when the narrator suddenly believes that she has become the woman she once thought was trapped inside the wallpaper. Of the women she believes she sees creeping in the garden, she asks, “I wonder if they all come out of that wallpaper as I did?”

In the falling action, the narrator no longer recognizes her identity as her own, appearing to refer to herself in the third person, as “Jane,” and insisting that she will not be “put […] back” into the wallpaper by anyone. In the resolution, her husband faints in her path, and she crawls right over top of him on her way around the room.

An easy way to approach answering a question like this is to identify a literary device that is used and then turn that into a question. For example, if, when reading this excellent short story, you come across a simile or a metaphor, you can easily create a question based on literary terminology by asking what kind of literary term is being used in that quote. For example, this might be a good sample question you could use:

You think you have mastered it, but just as you get well under way in following, it turns a back-somersault and there you are. It slaps you in the face, knocks you down, and tramples upon you. It is like a bad dream.

So what literary technique is used in this quote? The answer is of course a simile that occurs in the last sentence, when the pattern on the yellow wallpaper is described as being "like a bad dream." So, my advice to you is to go back and re-read this excellent short story and identify literary terms that you could use to form the basis of questions. Hope this helps and good luck!