She must, therefore, obey his orders. Also note that for Jane, writing is a "great relief" and yet her husband forbids her to do it. It doesn't matter to John what she thinks. So, while ethos is used to establish John's credibility as an accomplished doctor, that is challenged by Jane's ethos. It becomes a question of who to believe. This is one of the cruxes of the story. Is Jane credible and/or justified in rebelling in the way that she does? And does that challenge or destroy John's credibility?

There are a number of quotes that express Jane's dilemma that John seems to be loving but is also completely controlling. "He is very careful and loving, but hardly lets me stir without special direction." As pathos is a means of persuading the audience to empathize with a character, we are meant to empathize or sympathize with Jane. John might be genuine in his attempt to "cure" his wife, and if so, he is blinded by his own bias that he, as a doctor and a man, must be right and Jane must be wrong. Even if John's intentions are good, Jane is still effectively imprisoned. The wallpaper symbolizes the bars of her cell. The reader sympathizes with Jane, who feels trapped by a captor claiming to be her caregiver.

You could also argue that, this being a feminist text, Gilman presents this as a general statement about the plight of all women. When Jane sees many women in the wallpaper, this is symbolic of how most or all women are imprisoned (and made to crawl), in some way, by patriarchal society and traditional roles in a marriage.

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.

To start, "pathos" and "ethos" are essentially types of "appeals" or arguments meant to play to specific features of the audience to achieve the desired persuasion. Pathos are expressions that invoke emotional responses, specifically ones of sympathy, pity, and sorrow. Ethos attempts to use the character or qualifications of a person to get the intended audience to align with their thinking. 

The short story, "The Yellow Wallpaper" employs these literary methods repeatedly, especially ethos. The main character, an unnamed woman, has been suffering from what is termed "temporary nervous depression" following the birth of her first child. Her physician husband, John, has moved them into a rented mansion for the summer with the intent of having the main character recuperate away from the stresses of family and friends. Largely restricted to the former nursery, which features an odious yellow wallpaper pattern, the main character is waited upon closely by her sister-in-law and generally kept from stimulating tasks, like writing, reading, or extended conversation. These methods, as prescribed by her husband, are largely seen as unpleasant and frustrating by the main character. However, as ethos implies, the diagnosis and treatment are continually justified by the main character, John, and her family on the basis of his excellent reputation as a physician, and because, as the main character explains, John loves her very much and hates to see her sick.

Pathos is utilized largely by the main character towards the audience in her descriptions of her increasingly difficult circumstances. She initially draws sympathy by her explaining her "symptoms" of being too tired to do "what little" she can, of feeling too nervous to be around her child. She employs emotive language to detail that her situation is becoming more and more unbearable, especially due to the disconcerting wallpaper. In the final moments of the story, the main character once again draws upon the emotions of the audience in her justification for her barricade inside the room, stating that now John can't put her back into the wallpaper, relaying to the audience the full extent of her psychosis.