he garden or down that lovely lane" (1216) but she "lies down up here [in the room] a good deal. " (1216). This is another gradual step towards her embracing of an inward focus. Her complete acceptance of her introversion requires a rejection of the outside world. The plot flows directly to this occurrence. The woman distances herself from her husband by being afraid of him, and from the others by suspecting them of learning her secret about the patterns in the wallpaper. She also makes her world more completely internal by staining everything with the yellow of the wallpaper. "The paper stained everything it touched" (1219), including John. She is replacing outside elements in her immediate surroundings with the yellow that represents her inner mind. In order to further the process of staining everything yellow, the paper also develops a smell to her. This travels with her where she is taken by John, so that she is always at least partially in her internal world. The woman's gradual deterioration rapidly increases until she is finally alone in her internalized world, and has locked John out. She has adopted the constant creeping of the wallpaper woman. Her transition has been completed. She has become a complete burden to John, though her original goal was to become "such a help to John.” She has discovered the one place where she can have supreme control, and nothing will contest it--her own mind. But she has zero capability left to even interact normally with the outer physical world, and so she is like a non-presence. The strength of will she achieves in the end is a mockery, for in reality, she has been swallowed up by her own imagination, projected onto the yellow wallpaper. Work CitedGilman, Charlotte Perkins. The Yellow Wallpaper. Western Literature in a World Context. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1995. pp. 1213 – 1219....
