CoreyStruss

"It is the strangest yellow, that wall-paper! It makes me think of all the yellow things I ever saw — not beautiful ones like buttercups, but old foul, bad yellow things. But there is something else about that paper — the smell!"

Okay, so we know that the narrator has a mental disorder. I would too, being in the same situation as her - windows barred, a gate across the top of the stairs, her husband the physician having full control over her about what she can and cannot do. I think anyone would face some sort of mental instability when forced to live life like this.

Thanks to Erica's blogpost, I was able to delve a bit deeper into the mind of Ms. Gilman, and read an article by Gilman herself, entitled Why I Wrote The Yellow Wallpaper. She mentions that it was written intended to save people from going crazy. Knowing that this piece is an early work of feminist writing, we can deduce that Gilman was trying to protect housewives at the time, who had nothing better to do than "analyze the wallpaper that surrounded them". This could be taken as a figure of speech, or could be taken literally. Either way, women at the time faced the risk of being plagued by mental instability, and Gilman tried her best to alert and inform her targeted audience.