I fancy it is the pattern that keeps her so still... It keep me quiet by the hour" (Hunt, 179). With this, it is clear that Gilman sees herself as trapped in a very disruptive and confined world, one which ultimately drives her insane; also, this mysterious woman is a symbol of her physical self caught within a maze of confusion and despair, all because of the "yellow wallpaper" that clings to the walls of the nursery like some kind of dreadful disease. Finally, the narrator, driven mad by the wallpaper in the nursery, peels all of it away and says to her husband, "I've got out at last... And I've pulled off most of the paper, so you can't put me back!"which results in her husband fainting at her feet, "right across my path by the wall, so that I had to creep over him every time" (Hunt, 183). Without a doubt, Gilman the narrator as the woman behind the wallpaper is now completely mad, yet she has managed to escape her confinement behind the paper, a symbol of her exit from depression...

Unfortunately, since depression went relatively undiagnosed during the time that "The Yellow Wallpaper" was published, Gilman utilized symbolism as the only method to inform her readers that this disease was far more than "nervous agitation' and was in fact a very debilitating and life-altering condition.
Works Cited

Bauer, Dale. The Yellow Wallpaper: Charlotte Perkins Gilman. New York: Palgrave-

Macmillan, 1998.

Gilman, Charlotte Perkins. The Charlotte Perkins Gilman Reader: The Yellow Wallpaper and Other Fiction. New York: Pantheon Books, 1980.

Charlotte Perkins Gilman's The Yellow Wallpaper: A Sourcebook and Critical

Edition. New York: Feminist Press, 1977.

Glanze, Walter D., Ed. Mosby's Medical, Nursing and Allied Health Dictionary.

St. Louis: C.V. Mosby Company,…