According to the narrator's descriptions, this room is in a state very near to disrepair, plastered with "lurid" yellow wallpaper (perhaps mirroring her own mental state "masked" by the guise of "nervous depression"). The woman is mostly confined to this room with no stimulus except this yellow wallpaper and a journal in which she begins to secretly write. .
As her fixation with the wallpaper develops, the woman begins to take deep interest in the movement of its pattern-assigning movements and expressions to the inanimate paper. "[She] never saw so much expression in an inanimate thing before" (Gilman, 305). The reader can make the connection that the wall becomes expressive at the same exact time that she does (through writing). The more the authority figure-physician becomes insistent in the patient's isolation and "hardly lets [her] stir without special direction" (Gilman, 303), the more the woman fixates on the wallpaper. As this fierce isolation continues, the woman begins to see another woman behind the wallpaper. The author juxtaposes the revelation of the woman behind the wallpaper with the narrator being denied a trip to visit her cousins. The harder her husband opposes her ideas and confines her, the harder the narrator finds it to think straight and comply with what she has been directed to do. The parallels between the "woman stooping down and creeping about behind that patternjust as if she wanted to get out" and the narrator trapped in this nursery become very clear. .
Imagery used to describe the interactions between the narrator and external stimulus, including her husband, the wallpaper, and her surroundings depict the inner workings of the mind even more so than the anthropomorphic movement of the wallpaper's pattern. Toward the beginning of the text, Gilman juxtaposes a change in descriptions of the room from negative to positive with the husband's manipulation of his wife and patient.
