Likewise, the narrator is trapped within her prison-like room and mansion. The exterior of the mansion is described as a series of closed-off sections, while the room she rests in, with its numerous barred windows and immovable bed, was probably formerly used to house an insane inhabitant. This is the room where begins her slow descent into madness. The theme that restrictive societal roles can cause madness is present here.
John, as a practical doctor, shows lacking concern for his wife. He frequently refers to her with the diminutive "little" (582) and rarely takes her anxieties seriously. Instead, he constantly provides his own diagnosis, never allowing her to work off her sickness by writing. Overall, he treats her as a helpless daughter rather than as an independent wife. The narrator feels even worse and more like a burden without the identities of wife and mother. The theme of social restrictions is shown here because she lacks identity. Thus, her sickness intensifies.
Eventually, the narrator gets to the point where she takes notice of the wallpaper. Her first description of it says that it is "dull enough to confuse the eye in following, pronounced enough to constantly irritate and provoke study, and when you follow the lame uncertain curves for a little distance they suddenly commit suicide destroy themselves in unheard of contradictions" (577). The wallpaper, a usually feminine, floral decoration on the interior of walls, reinforces the theme of female imprisonment within the domestic sphere. Over the course of the story, the wallpaper becomes a text of sorts through which the narrator exercises her literary imagination and identifies with a feminist double figure. .
When John, by "hating her to have a word," (577) curbs her creativity and writing, the narrator takes it upon herself to make some sense of the wallpaper. She reverses her initial feeling of being watched by the wallpaper and starts actively studying and decoding its meaning.