Another symbol in this story is the yellow wallpaper from which the title is taken. The narrator, having absolutely nothing else to do, stares constantly at a pattern in the wallpaper, and finds relief from her monotonous days and nights by writing in a journal. In every few paragraphs, she analyzes the wallpaper. By looking deeper into her journal entries, we discover that she is really analyzing herself and her illness. She begins to see "a strange, provoking, formless sort of figure that seems to skulk about behind that silly and conspicuous front design." She explains her illness (as seen in the wallpaper) as "not arranged on any laws of radiation, or alternation, or repetition, or symmetry, or anything else that I ever heard of." In other words, she cannot make any sense of what is causing her illness. She becomes obsessed with the wallpaper, and then with the actions of the women she sees in the wallpaper. She says that the women are "all the time trying to climb through." At this point, she has not yet become aware of the fact that the actions of these women are, in reality, her own actions. She is trying to escape, or "climb through" to escape the male-dominated society in which she lives, and it is causing her to lose her sanity. It is not until her last day at the mansion that she finally realizes the women she has been watching so intensely are really just fragments of her own thoughts and desires. She believes that she has at last cured herself of the illness, when really the opposite has happened: the insanity has taken over.
The women who hide behind the wallpaper symbolize more than just the narrator's hopes of escaping. They stand for every woman who feels confined to the wants of a man; every woman who waits for her husband to leave for work so she can relax and enjoy her freedom. Society constantly tries to portray women as being perfectly ladylike, but if we hold ourselves up to these standards we realize that we are not perfect, and we feel like failures.