The Yellow Wallpaper was a creation meant to address the role of women in late nineteenth century society. Below is a short and thoroughly INcomplete critical analysis of the work, discussing symbolism and irony and their effects on the work. This analysis brought to you by Glidden, who really needs to work on his writing skills! For whatever reason the paragraphs died, and I'm too lazy to replace them to normal readable form!

Tamaki has just added some other stuff [at the bottom] on The Yellow Wallpaper since she's so amazing.

At the end of the nineteenth century, women’s rights activists took a hand in changing their world; these reformers ultimately gave women a voice in society. One such woman, Charlotte Gilman, experienced a severe mental illness and later wrote “The Yellow Wallpaper” to encourage other women to find their own voices. Rather than petition for the vote as many of her contemporaries of the 1890’s did, Gilman wanted something far more significant: independence and freedom of the female mind. The fictionalized account of Gilman’s own experiences, along with its symbolism and irony, demonstrates that the most obvious door to freedom is not the only path: an independent person has the power to create her own road. The characters of “The Yellow Wallpaper” exist to portray the typical dynamic of late nineteenth century relationships. The narrator, Jane, is controlled extensively by her husband John, who forces her to refrain from any intellectual activity. The names John and Jane are significant in themselves because they represent a generic couple. By naming her characters John and Jane, Gilman attempts to convey that her character’s relationship is not unusual; in fact, it is a representation of society as a whole. Color plays an especially crucial role in “The Yellow Wallpaper”; the changes in color reflect changes in mood and the narrator’s mental state. Jane notices something strange about the yellow room as soon as she enters. The primary oddity is the color yellow itself. Yellow signifies nervous energy and tension; in fact, the longer Jane lives in the room, the more anxious she becomes. Her sentences become filled with exclamations, and she complains more and more that her mind runs fallow as her husband and brother dismiss her concerns. Furthermore, the color seems to radiate a feeling of disease: plants that are denied water and sunlight turn from green to yellow as their health fades. Indeed, the color yellow signifies that all of Jane’s vitality is spent; she is mentally undernourished, and as the room’s color becomes more pronounced, so does Jane’s weariness and anxiety. Toward the end of the story, Jane breaks out of her room and into the garden. The diseased yellow is replaced by a pastoral shades of green, which that exude a sense of tranquility and health. The deep green hue indicates that Jane is finally being mentally nourished. After moving past her husband’s restrictions, she can bask in sunlight and freedom. The progression of color shows how Jane transitions from mental health to insanity; John and his control over his wife’s behavior effect this change. While the story’s colors contribute to Gilman’s social commentary, the physical components of the house and garden outside are symbols for the relationship between societal structure and nature. Jane’s surroundings represent her state of mind. As the story begins, the house and garden are in balance. Jane’s slowly increasing anxiety leads to her confinement by a husband who ignores her natural need for intellectual stimulation. In the guise of protecting her, John restricts her within the house, symbolically limiting her creativity and emotions. As time goes on, Jane spends more and more of her time within the yellow room. She ceases walking in the garden and lies in bed instead. Jane’s increasing physical confinement reflects the restrictions placed upon her by John. When Jane is required to stay within a small space, when her freedom is restricted, she loses her mental capabilities. As time passes, her sentences become shorter, and her exclamations more frequent. Her only means of expression is through a secret diary; by preventing her from writing, John suppresses her mentally and emotionally. Jane fills her secret diary with observations identifying the barred windows, the erratic streaks on the wall, and the sickly smell of fungus. Indeed, her observations correlate exactly with her mental state. Her initial remarks include sunlight and fresh air, both symbolic of freedom. These symbols illustrate that her confinement is unnatural and suffocating. The jumbled lines on the walls seem to “commit suicide” in the midst of their confused dashing across the room; they portray disorganized thinking, and mental instability. Jane then notices the most sinister element of the story: the fungus. A representation of the decay of Jane’s mind, the fungal growth and its foul, choking odor parallel Jane’s descent into insanity. Her husband controls the only egress. He believes that his control means that she can leave her prison only when she satisfies his requirements. Instead of giving in to her husband, Jane releases her true inner self and breaks out of the room into the open garden, “in spite of [John] and Jane.” Here, Jane references her old self, the person who would do anything her husband wanted despite the cost to herself. By exercising her personal power, Jane has achieved freedom, and serves as a role model for women of the late nineteenth century. “The Yellow Wallpaper” ends with a flurry of ironic twists; while the symbolism of the story enables readers to comprehend the degradation of women in society, the irony demonstrates that women are as intelligent and competent as men. As Jane struggles to maintain her sanity, her husband advises her to “use [her] will and self-control” to curb her chronic anxiety. Ironically, by giving in to her anxieties, Jane begins to recover; she follows her husband’s advice and uses her willpower to break free. She rips apart the wallpaper, freeing her mind and creating a portal into the garden. She takes charge of her confinement by locking herself in the room, choosing to close herself off from her husband’s restrictions. Although she confines herself to the room further, by removing John’s influence, she musters enough confidence and strength to break apart from her imprisonment entirely. Her single step away from independence actually results in a leap toward it. As Jane attains her freedom, John assumes the traditionally feminine quality of delicacy: he faints. This reversal of roles indicates that men are equal to women. Even more, John’s fainting reveals that women are only considered delicate because they are forced into roles that limit their autonomy. Since women are pushed into behaving with exaggerated frailty, they exhibit it more often than men. The ironic application of willpower and Jane’s leap toward freedom, combined with John’s sudden reversal, demonstrate the capabilities of an empowered woman; that woman can follow any path she wishes, even when the door is controlled by others. John had controlled the only door, and assumed that Jane would need to satisfy his requirements before she could have any kind of freedom. When Jane breaks into the green, away from the room, she demonstrates that she is strong enough to travel a path she creates for herself. Jane’s pathway is not a perfect opening leading into a structured hallway; it is rough around the edges and leads to a sharp drop. After the plunge, though, Jane is free. While there may have been only one door, there was certainly not one way out of the room; through Jane, others learn that they can forge their own paths in life.

taken from wikipedia:

Feminist interpretation
This story has been interpreted by feminist critics as a condemnation of the androcentric hegemony of 19th century medical profession. The narrator's suggestions about her recuperation (that she should work instead of rest, that she should engage with society instead of remaining isolated, that she should attempt to be a mother instead of being separated entirely from her child, etc.) are dismissed out of hand using language that stereotypes her as an irrational being and, therefore, not qualified to offer ideas about her own condition. Gilman indicated that the idea for the story originated in her own experience as a patient. Other feminist readings have pointed out the inequality of the marriage described in the story and have discussed this aspect of the story in relation to Victorian ideals and traditions of marriage.
"The Yellow Wallpaper" is sometimes referred to as an example of Gothic literature for its treatment of madness and powerlessness. It has also been published in collections of horror fiction, which has led some to speculate that the women in the wallpaper were actually ghosts bent on driving the narrator insane, and not hallucinations. The strong feminist statements claimed for the work and the author's own explanations do not lend support to a supernatural interpretation, although the story's treatment of madness and nervous breakdown still places it in the Gothic mode.
The feminist interpretation has also drawn on the concept of the “domestic sphere” that women were held in during this period. "The Yellow Wallpaper" has a lot to do with the subordination of marriage and the domestic work of the wife, while the husband has an active working life.[1]
The role of the feminist revival was to find the degree of triumph at the end of "The Yellow Wallpaper." While some may claim the narrator slipped into insanity, others see the ending as a female's assertion of freedom in a marriage she felt trapped in.[2] The emphasis on reading and writing being gendered practices also illustrated the importance of the wallpaper. If the narrator was not allowed to write in her journal nor read, she would begin to "read" the wallpaper until she found what she was looking for; an escape. Through seeing the women in the wallpaper, the narrator realizes she could not live her life locked up behind bars.

[edit] Psychological and medical interpretation

Another interpretation is to doubt the veracity of many of the narrator's early statements -- to regard her as an unreliable narrator from the very beginning. There may never have been a husband, sister, baby, or any other characters as described in the story, meaning the entire story (or a large part of it) is the product of a deluded mind, so the reader cannot know what is true and what is not. This is supported by her description of the room she is being held in. Finally, she makes herself the woman inside the prison of yellow wallpaper, completely overtaken by her irrational reality.
Nevertheless, the narrator was given a medical fear of depression, a conventional "women's disease" of the nineteenth century. Through her therapeutic regimen, language was involved in several ways. In the beginning journals the narrator wrote, she censored her language and had an artificial feminine self who reinforced the terms her husband imposed on her. [3]. She had to hide the fact she was writing, therefore proving the journal was her sense of escape. It is important to note that she was confiding to "dead paper" and was reluctant to tell a living soul her thoughts, since they mis-treated her medically. Also, the role of the wallpaper is an interesting topic in regard to the narrator's insanity, since wallpaper is a feminine topic in regard to decorating and decor, two primarily female interests.

& some more...

Feminism and the yellow wallpaper: In "The Yellow Wallpaper," wallpaper, a usually feminine, floral decoration on the interior of walls, is a symbol of female imprisonment within the domestic sphere (see Female imprisonment in the domestic sphere, below). 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 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. She untangles its chaotic pattern and locates the figure of a woman struggling to break free from the bars in the pattern. Over time, as her insanity deepens, she identifies completely with this woman‹the bars in her own room help her cause‹and believes she, too, is trapped within the wallpaper. When she tears down the wallpaper over her last couple of nights, she believes that she has broken out of the wallpaper within which John has imprisoned her. The wallpaper's yellow color has many possible associations‹with jaundiced sickness, with discriminated against minorities of the time (especially the Chinese), and with the rigid oppression of masculine sunlight (see Sunlight as oppressive, moonlight as liberating, below). By tearing it down, the narrator emerges from the wallpaper and asserts her own identity, albeit a somewhat confused, insane one. Though she must crawl around the room, as the woman in the wallpaper crawls around, this "creeping" is the first stage in a feminist uprising; though the early feminists had to hide in the shadows, they paved the way for later generations to walk with heads held high.

Female imprisonment in the domestic sphere: John's domineering ways have imprisoned the narrator into a domestic prison. Just as the woman in the wallpaper is imprisoned within a symbol of the feminine domestic sphere (see Feminism and the yellow wallpaper, above), in which women are expected only to clean the house and take care of the children, 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. The narrator's sense of being watched by the wallpaper suggests the idea of the room as a surveillance-friendly prison cell. John, as a practical doctor, has patronizing concern his imaginative, literary wife. He frequently refers to her with the diminutive "'little'" and rarely takes her anxieties seriously. Instead, he always provides his own diagnosis, never allowing her to work off her sickness by writing. Overall, he infantilizes her, treating 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 nanny, Mary, and John's housekeeper sister, Jennie, replace her in these regards. Unlike the narrator, Mary and Jennie do not have any aspirations beyond the domestic prison of the house.
Sunlight as oppressive, moonlight as liberating: Although the yellow color of the wallpaper has associations with illness and minorities (see Feminism and the yellow wallpaper, above), its most developed motif is with sunlight and moonlight. Sunlight is associated with John's ordered, dominating schedule; he prescribes something for the narrator for every waking hour while he goes about his daily rounds. The narrator, however, prefers to sleep in the daytime. At night, men's day jobs on the outside are more irrelevant and the balance between the sexes is evened somewhat at home. More importantly, the flexible subconscious roams free at night, as in during dreams. It is always by moonlight, a traditional symbol of femininity, that the narrator understands more about the figure trapped within the wallpaper. In sunlight, the woman stays still, afraid of being caught, and once she creeps about outside, she does so boldly only at night. The narrator cannot see this as well under the oppressive glare of sunlight in her room, but it becomes very clear by the cool, feminine light of the moon.

Aesthetic changes through insanity: Often overlooked for the deep symbolic content of the story, Gilman's prose is a model for a convincingly gradual and subtle decline into insanity. The narrator's tone changes from naïve and depressed to paranoid and excited, and as she grows insane, her sentences reflect the state of her mind. Much like the chaotic pattern in the wallpaper, the sentences get choppy and confusing, grafting together disconnected one-line comments.