This action only represents that John concludes that she belongs in a nursery. The narrator describes the room:.
I never saw worse paper in my life. One of those sprawling, flamboyant patterns committing every artistic sin. It is dull enough to confuse the eye in following, pronounced enough constantly to irritate and provoke study, and when you follow the lame uncertain curves for a distance they suddenly commit suicide-plunge off at outrageous angles, destroy themselves in unheard-of contradictions. (471).
The narrator evidently finds the wallpaper disturbing. Unable to get past this unsightly fraying yellow wallpaper, studying it begins to consume her energies. At one point, she tries to convey her discomfort about the room to her husband , but with no avail, because he would never give in to such a superstitious notion. Between wandering the gardens and sneaking around to write in her journal, she lies resting in bed tormented by the wallpaper pattern. The woman notices, "There is a recurrent spot where the pattern lolls like a broken neck and two bulbous eyes stare at you upside down. . . . Those absurd unblinking eyes are everywhere" (472). John S. Bak wrote, "It is a room whose wallpaper reduces an artistic and articulate woman to a beast, stripped entirely of her sanity and humanity and left crawling on all-fours in circuits, or smooches, about the room"(39). The bedroom was only annoying and ugly at first, now it is causing paranoia in the narrator. .
The woman is convinced that the eyes are watching her every move, surveying her constantly. After staring at the wallpaper for so long she projects herself into the pattern; "Behind that outside pattern the dim shapes get clearer every day . . . . It is like a woman stooping down and creeping about behind that pattern. The faint figure behind seem[s] to shake the pattern, just as if she want[s] to get out"(475 Gilman).
