increasingly paranoid about John and Jennie, the housekeeper. "The fact is, I am getting a little afraid of John. He seems very queer sometimes and even Jennie has an inexplicable look." She also begins to smell the yellow wallpaper wherever she goes, and soon she believes she actually sees the woman from the wallpaper creeping in the garden during the day.The narrator begins to see the woman in the wallpaper more clearly: "And she is all the time trying to climb through the patter-it strangles so; I think that is why it has so many heads. They get through and then the pattern strangles them off and turns them upside down, and makes their eyes white!" This is another symbolic reference to the fate of women fo tried to escape the path society has prescribed for them.As the narrator slips even deeper into madness, she becomes determined to help the woman from the wallpaper escape. She waits until she is alone, then strips the wallpaper from the wall. In order to reach higher, she attempts to move the bed; when she is unable to do so, she gnaws the bed.The narrator locks the doors and throws the key out the window. When John finally manages to get in the room, he finds his wife, completely mad now, "creeping" around the edge of the wall. When asked what she is doing, the narrator replies, "I've gout out at last . . . in spite of you and Jane. And I've pulled off most of the paper, so you can't put me back!" Although Gilman does not tell us who Jane is, it is plausible that the narrator's name is Jane and, in her madness, she believes she has become the woman from the wallpaper and finally escaped. "The Yellow Wallpaper" is a fascinating look into the mind of a woman slipping deeper and deeper into mental illness. It is also, however, clearly a statement by Gilman of the absurd confines society places on the women of her time and the extreme consequences that befell the women who attempted to break free of those confines....
