Charlotte Perkins Gilman "The Yellow Wallpaper"

“At night in any kind of light, in twilight, candlelight, lamplight, and worst of all by moonlight, it became bars!” (493)

This quote is very meaningful in Gilman’s story. The narrator says she sees a woman trapped behind the wallpaper in one of the rooms. She describes it as a horrendous yellow paper which strikes her each time she comes near it. The woman behind the paper that the narrator is able to see is actually her own self trapped behind the bars of John’s control.
The above quote means that there was never anything worse in her life than the condition, or rather the treatment of her husband, she was now affected with. The treatment she received from John was very strange and questionable. John treated the narrator like a child, without having any say about what she wanted to do or felt was right for her. No wonder she thought there was something wrong with her. If a person is told that they are not well and is not allowed to spend time with family, other than her husband and his sister, then sooner or later that person will begin to believe it, too. Moreover, her husband and his sister were more of outsiders to her than family. They did not treat the woman as a human being but rather, almost as a rat under a microscope in some kind of laboratory. The narrator was controlled and abused by John’s unexplainable nature and she suffered tremendously due to his false sense of care giving.
In the quote above, the concept of night and light means that the narrator felt the most trapped when John was home from work at night. Her predator, as I would like to call him, was now present and fully overpowered her every move. This poor woman was critically lessened and her existence made almost no difference at all. As John returned home at night, her bars were put back up and she no longer could feel like it was possible for her to write or just sit in the room by herself. She now had to listen to the orders of her insensitive husband.
I am lead to believe that there was never anything wrong with the woman but it was instilled in her that she was not well. After some time, after being secluded from the rest of the world, any person would start to act like this woman did. She feels trapped, isolated, and alone. She begins to hallucinate and thinks she sees a woman behind bars inside the hideous yellow wallpaper. What does the yellow wallpaper represent? To me it represents the masking of John’s true intentions. She desperately tries to tear it down, which stands for taking down that wall John had built against her and the rest of the world. She did not have freedom, under any circumstances. Her life was taken into the hands of someone who had completely lost his mind, but was made to believe that the problem laid in her.