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Freedom and Self Expression:
The narrator is forced to hide her feelings from her husband, and the emotional and mental restrictions she faced are what ultimately drive her insane. Coping with the isolation proved futile for the narrator, and she imagined herself as the woman in the wallpaper, trying so desperately to escape.
The wallpaper and the woman in the wallpaper:
The wallpaper represents the narrator's feelings of being trapped. She is the woman in the wallpaper, feeling that her marriage and treatment for depression are inescapable.
Ironically, Gilman is using wallpaper, found in several homes, has a representation of the domestic life that left several women of the time period feeling trapped in their sense of responsibility and tradition.
The Narrator
John
The narrator and her husband are vacationing, but the narrator is feeling depressed. Her husband, John, is a doctor and tells her that, in order to get better, she is resorted to little activity. However, she keeps a secret journal and records her thoughts. In her journal, she describes the house they are staying in, and the ugly, off-putting wallpaper on the walls. As the story goes on, the narrator becomes obsessed with the wallpaper and figuring out the intricate pattern. She determines that it resembles a woman "creeping" behind the wallpaper. She notices a smudge mark on the wall, as if it had been rubbed by someone crawling against it. The narrator gets crazier as the days go on, and in a fit of madness, starts tearing off the wallpaper in an attempt to free the woman trapped behind the wallpaper. At the end of the story, she says that there are many women who have escaped from the wallpaper, herself being one of them. Her husband comes into the room, and upon seeing her creeping around the room, promptly faints in her way so she had “to creep over him every time!"