Through this symbol, she sees all that she could be and everything that she could have. As she says near the end of the story, "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 always creeping, and most women do not creep by daylight."" (585) .
She knows that she has to hide and lie low; she has to creep in order to be a part of society and she does not want to see all the other women who have to do the same because she knows they are a reflection of herself. " most women do not creep by daylight."" (585) expresses the fact that the women need to hide in the shadows; trying to move without being seen, attempting to function in a society that has engineered no place for a woman except in the home. The window is no longer a gateway for her; she can not enter to the other side of it, literally, because her husband John will not let her outside down the path, (this is illustrated by the bars on the windows), but also because that world will not belong to her. She will still be controlled and be forced to stifle her self-expression. She will still be forced to creep about the room.
More immediate to facilitating her metamorphosis than the house itself is the room she is in, specifically the characteristics of that room, the most important being the yellow wall-paper which also plays a double role; it has the ability to trap her in with its intricacy of pattern, and leads her to satisfying end. It is these patterns that are holding in, or keeping out, our main character from her own psyche, illustrating the separation of her conflicts of herself. She describes the wall-paper as being the worst thing she has ever seen: "The color is repellant, almost revolting; a smoldering unclean yellow, strangely faded by the slow-turning sunlight." (577) .