The Symbolism of "The Yellow Wallpaper"

            In the story of “The Yellow Wallpaper,” I find that the presence of the wallpaper itself represents one of the largest symbolisms. As story proceeds, it is apparent that wallpaper, which the narrator comes to hate so much, is a significant symbol in the story. I find that yellow wallpaper represents many ideas that consist of the sense of entrapment, the notion of creativity, and a health condition. Indeed, there are multiple ways to interpret the symbolism of wallpaper and I’d like to share some of my own ideas.

            From the beginning of the story, since the time narrator encounters the wallpaper, it is seen as something that drives narrator to interpret and that it affects her directly. Narrator first sees it as unpleasant - it is ripped, soiled, and “unclean yellow.” It contains ostensibly formless pattern, which fascinates the narrator to figure it out using her artistic perception. After staring at it for countless hours, her perception changes drastically. She describes by saying, “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 (Gilman 12).” Her observation suggests the sub-pattern behind the main pattern is visible to be as a desperate woman, constantly crawling and stooping. The woman is looking for an escape from behind the main pattern, which she finds as the bars of a cage. Essentially, the women crawling behind the pattern also show narrator’s feeling of confinement to the wallpaper of her room. Clearly, the wallpaper represents the structure and situation of her status to be trapped in a way to symbolize the domestic life that restricts her from being “free.”

            The association of the color represented in the wallpaper also suggests an important symbolism as well. From what I see, the wallpaper symbolizes the health condition to place on women. Generally, the color yellow represents sickness or weakness by its meaning. The wallpaper’s disgusting yellow symbolizes the narrator’s own “illness”. This sickly yellow strongly depicts its restrictive and unpleasant circumstance, just like the narrator’s “illness,” which is fed by the confinement placed upon her current physical and mental condition. The wallpaper, in fact, makes the narrator more “sick” and worsens in health to the certain extent. The yellow wallpaper, to which I perceive, is a symbol of health screens that women encounter for having placed in such position. Furthermore, I can perceive how wallpaper’s color is “infuriating” and “torturing” from narrator’s suffering perspective under her restrictive placement in the society she lived in.

            To wrap up my idea, I find that these are some of the symbolisms present within the wallpaper itself. The wallpaper is perhaps one of the major symbols illustrated in the story that contains reflective and meaningful representation in regards to the narrator’s status. At the end, I view that this symbolic power of the wallpaper asserts and functions itself with greater prominence until to the point in which the narrator tears it to become “free.”