The Yellow Wallpaper

     In the "Yellow Wallpaper," we see our narrator become obsessed with a nursery, and spend much of her day inside it staring at the patterns on the wall trying to decipher their meaning. In other classes, I've had professors mention that frequently, houses and rooms are used as metaphors for a person's mind. If we follow this vein of thought, we see that the narrator is confined in a prison of a room, much the same way as a part of her is trapped within her mind. The wallpaper is a disgusting shade of yellow that sets a sort of sickly tone to the story. If we take the room as mental state metaphor, we see that the yellow of the room implies a sick, mentally ill mind. Furthermore, we notice that the narrator continuously stares at the wallpaper and sees a woman creeping around the sides of the room, always creeping. However, the housekeeper notes to the narrator that there are yellow stains all over her clothes. We thus can infer that the creeping figure is actually the narrator, walking along the walls of the room, simulating a circling around of thoughts in the character's interior state. With these notions in mind, we can therefore interpret the room with the yellow wallpaper as being the narrator's mind, and her insanity stems from the constant, enforced introspection her husband has set for her, essentially forcing her to look at the parts of her life and self that she is unsatisfied with, while preventing her from actually doing anything about them.