2. How does the description of wallpaper change over time?

[Jen]

2. How does the narrator's description of the wallpaper change over time? How is the wallpaper representative of the domestic sphere?

[Diane]

She goes from hating the paper to seeing things in the paper. "There is a recurrent spot where the pattern lolls like a broken neck and two bulbous eyes stare at you upside down".

[Kristel]

It shows the changes that the woman goes through as she is kept in this room.

[Pip]

She begins by describing the wallpaper in a rational way, but as the story progresses she begins to imagine all sorts of things about the paper and at the end is convinced that there is a woman trapped inside the wallpaper.

[Jan]

Jane detests the wallpaper at first. It is repellent, unclean, with a suicidal design. Its dullness irritates her and she studies its patterns almost obsessively at first. It's also interesting that the wallpaper in the room is "stripped off ... in great patches all around the head of my bed, about as far as I can reach", almost as though another woman has been imprisoned in the room and clawed at the wallpaper while she is restored to a socially acceptable state.

Jane ascribes personality to the wallpaper and imagines it is staring at her. Such impertinence angers her, but gradually she begins to develop a sort of Stockholm Syndrome about it. She spends so much time staring at it, following its patterns, that she starts to try to understand it.

She begins to see a woman imprisoned in the pattern, which is an acknowledgement of her own imprisonment. It spurs her to talk to John about her need to leave, but to no avail.

Jane is bored and all she really has to occupy her is studying the wallpaper. The colour ceases to be important. It's the complicated pattern that pulls in her inactive creativity. I remember being ill in bed as a child and spending hours studying the wallpaper in my bedroom. It was almost hallucinatory, trying to follow a pattern of embossed flowers to work out if there was a logic to it. Jane becomes obsessed with the changes the wallpaper undergoes in different light.