Symbolism of The Yellow Wallpaper

The story of The Yellow Wallpaper main symbol is the wallpaper. The narrator is caged in her new baby’s nursery because her husband believes she is sick. The nursery is covered in Yellow Wallpaper that’s torn in places. She tries to get out of the room and walk around the house but her husband puts her back in her room immediately. She lays in her room and stares at the wallpaper and sees a woman trying to get out. The wallpaper symbolizes her inner cage or saneness. She has the outer cage, the room. The inner cage is more of a cage in her mind. She can’t escape it because it’s surrounding her. She tries to help the woman in the wallpaper get out. The woman in the wallpaper symbolizes her. She starts the tear the wallpaper off, starts to feel free. In removing more of it she starts to act how her husband thinks she should. The more she removed the more she started to think on her own.


The wallpaper was like an extension of what her husband believed, that she was crazy. When she starts to remove it she starts to get away from him.In getting away from him she is starting to feel free. In feeling free she is feeling up for anything.She stays up to finish remove the wallpaper. and when she finally does finish the woman in the wallpaper gets out. Her husband then comes in and realizes what she has done. Then he passes out and falls in the doorway. Now the narrator has become like the woman in the wallpaper forever trapped in her own cage.


I feel as though the wallpaper was the cause of her ‘craziness’. She was trapped by her husband in her new baby’s nursery, which had the yellow wallpaper. She tried to get away from it by leaving but her husband didn’t let her. She then noticed the woman who was trapped in the wallpaper. She lets the woman out and then she is trapped in her own mind, the worse cage there is.

At the beginning the wallpaper is already torn, which represents her state of mind at the start of the story. At first her mind is half and half, sane and insane. Then as the story goes on the wallpaper gets torn more. Showing that she’s going to one side more the other. Her husband believes she is getting closer to the insane side. Where as she thinks she more on the sane side. The more wallpaper she removes the more she leaves one side and goes to the other. By the end when all the wallpaper is removed she’s completely on one side. Her husband would say the insane side. She might say the same. She ends up staying in the cage that she was trying to escape. Even though the whole time she was trying so hard to get out she ended up feeling safer inside her ‘cage’. I think she felt safe in her cage the whole time but it took her the whole story to realize it.