During their stay, the patient is confined mostly to the nursery at the top of the house. She is not very fond of the room because she finds it ugly: “No wonder the children hated it! I should hate it myself if I had to live in this room long.” She has no say in the furniture of the room even though she asked him to change it: “At first he meant to repaper the room, but afterwards he said that it was getting the better of me, and that nothing was worse for a nervous patient than to give way to such fancies.” Since she spends most of her time in the nursery, even though she hates it, she becomes obsessed by the wallpaper and stares at its patterns for hours, sometimes she follows the pattern to a point of exhaustion: “It makes me tired to follow it. I will take a nap I guess.” She does not sleep much at night because she thinks she sees things in the paper: “There are things in that paper that nobody knows but me, or ever will. Behind that outside pattern, the dim shapes get clearer every day. It is always the same shape, only very numerous.” After a few nights, the patterns seem to take shape for her: “I didn’t realize for a long time what the thing was that showed up behind, that dim sub-pattern, but now I am quite sure it is a woman.” The patient is confident that the front pattern moves because the woman behind shakes it.
The patient then claims to see the woman from behind the wallpaper getting out during daytime and creeping about outside her window: “I think that woman gets out in the daytime! And I’ll tell you why-privately-I’ve seen her! I can see her out of every one of my windows! It is the same woman. I know, for she is always creeping, and most women do not creep by daylight.” The patient no longer fears the woman that she sees coming out of the wallpaper, since she feels like a prisoner in the mansion, she sees in the woman, the freedom that she is seeking: “I always lock the door when I creep by daylight. I can’t do it at night, for I know John would suspect something at once.”
Towards the end of the story, the patient wants to prove to everybody and especially to her husband that the woman inside the wallpaper does really exist and that she is not crazy, so she locks herself up in the room and throws away the key: “I’ve got a rope up here that even Jennie did not find. If that woman does get out, and tries to get away, I can tie her!” When John manages to open the door, he finds that his wife has pulled off most of the wallpaper. John faints because he realizes that his wife has gone completely mad thinking that by ripping off the wallpaper she is now free. The patient compares herself to the woman in the wallpaper as both being prisoners, one being trapped behind the wallpaper and herself being trapped in the mansion, so symbolically by ripping the paper, they are both free: “ ‘I’ve got out at last’, said I, ‘in spite of you and Jane. And I’ve pulled off most of the paper, so you can’t put me back!’”
When Charlotte Perkins Gilman wrote “The Yellow Wallpaper”, she wrote it mostly to show us the conditions, hardships and submissiveness to men that women in the late 19th century had to go through. However, not enough emphasis was put on the lack of treatment that mental patients or people seen as to have mental problems had to go through, where they were mostly used as guinea pigs in new treatments such as shock therapy.
