In the story "The Yellow Wallpaper" John and his wife rent a house for the summer, secluded from the village, standing well back from the road. John brings his wife here so she can get rest, and get better. John is a physician and he says his wife has a slight nervous depression and getting rest, not working and not looking after her child wi

As she focuses on the things that she hates about the wallpaper, you can understand what she is beginning to realize. She starts to realize that her husband is controlling her. The color and texture of the wallpaper especially symbolizes this. This is shown when she writes even more about the paper,

The wife literally feels she was behind the wall paper bars, and that she can go in and out of the section she tore as she pleases. When John arrives he gets the key and enters his wife's room she screams,

As the wife begins to realize the significance of the wallpaper she analyzes it further. At first she thought the pattern of the wallpaper was difficult and confusing to decipher, but as time progresses she is in her room pretending to sleep more often. This allows her even more time to focus on the pattern of the wallpaper. It takes many days and many hours to make any sense of it, but soon she discovers what pattern the wallpaper makes. She finds the pattern very hard to make sense of during the day. But at night she makes sense of it all, the next day she writes about her findings as:

After reading and interpreting the symbolism in "The Yellow Wallpaper," we can now understand the basic conflict of the story. John is the man of the house, he is the husband and he is also a physician. In the 19th century males had an arrogant belief in science. His wife's illness is perplexing him and he does not want anyone to know that he doesn't really understand her illness. He thought that by controlling his wife, not allowing her to think imaginatively, and making her sleep all day was doing her good. But the further he restricted her, the more unhealthy she got. John's wife writes about this in the beginning of the story and she says,

It is the strangest yellow, that wall-paper! It makes me think of all the yellow things I ever saw - not beautiful ones like buttercups, but old foul, bad yellow things. (327)

The bedroom that she is to sleep in for the entire summer is an old nursery. There are many more rooms in the house that are pretty and have nice wall paper, but John puts his wife in the nursery as if she is a child (320). The wife has a child and cannot look after it, by orders of John, and it gets to sleep in a different, nicer room. The fact that she is confined to the nursery for most of the day does not help her mind get any better. She lets her imagination run wild, trying to follow the pattern of the wallpaper, and in doing so she becomes more childish as the days go by because she is going insane.

The numerous new colors and shoots represent the ways John controls her more and more every day. John's wife even realizes that she does not like it and she feels it is bad. This is represented in the story when she writes,

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Approximate Word count = 1962
Approximate Pages = 8 (250 words per page double spaced)