Her repressed imagination takes control, and she loses all sense of reality, becoming lost in delusions and the idea that she herself was the woman trapped in the wallpaper. Although the narrator attempts to incorporate John’s rationality into the chaotic pattern of the wallpaper, she fails the wallpaper cannot be quantified in John’s way. Because she is not able to write openly and feels the repression of her imagination, she inadvertently exercises her mind via the yellow wallpaper. However, the narrator is not able to suppress her creativity, despite her best efforts to follow John’s instructions. In essence, a large part of the “rest cure” focuses on John’s attempt to remove the narrator’s creativity by forcing her to give up her writing, he hopes that he will calm her anxious nature and help her to assume her role as an ideal wife and mother.

John does not recognize his wife’s fundamental creativity and believes that he can force out her imaginative fancies and replace them with his own solid rationality. As a writer, the narrator thrives in her use of her imagination, and her creativity is an inherent part of her nature. Rationalityįrom the beginning of the story, the narrator’s creativity is set in conflict with John’s rationality. Though she must crawl around the room, as the woman in the wallpaper crawls around, this 'creeping' is the first stage in a feminist uprising. By tearing it down, the narrator emerges from the wallpaper and asserts her own identity, albeit a somewhat confused, insane one. The wallpaper's yellow color has many possible associations - with jaundiced sickness, with discriminated-against minorities of the time (especially the Chinese), and with the rigid oppression of masculine sunlight. When she tears down the wallpaper over her last couple of nights, she believes that she has finally broken out of the wallpaper within which John has imprisoned her.

Over time, as her insanity deepens, she identifies completely with this woman and believes that she, too, is trapped within the wallpaper. She untangles its chaotic pattern and locates the figure of a woman struggling to break free from the bars in the pattern. She reverses her initial feeling of being watched by the wallpaper and starts actively studying and decoding its meaning. When John curbs her creativity and writing, the narrator takes it upon herself to make some sense of the wallpaper. Over the course of the story, the wallpaper becomes a text of sorts through which the narrator exercises her literary imagination and identifies with a feminist double figure. In the story, wallpaper, a usually feminine, floral decoration on the interior of walls, is a symbol of female imprisonment within the domestic sphere.

The yellow wallpaper sparknotes