The Yellow Wallpaper

The narrator in The Yellow Wallpaper

How does her eventual isolation in the room contribute to her downfall?

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The isolation in the eventually leads to her insanity. This insanity is manifested within the yellow wallpaper. 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 and believes that she, too, is trapped within the wallpaper.

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