r. On another level, the story of this one woman is intended to represent the plight of women in the marriage state of the time, and the woman imprisoned in the wallpaper is the woman imprisoned in marriage, unable to express herself, and feeling more and more the claustrophobia of marriage. This woman cannot express herself outside of marriage because she is completely dependent on her husband for her financial well-being, and he treats her as a dependent in every way.
The protagonist speaks through her journal, her means of artistic expression, and from the beginning it is clear that she is treated as someone who needs to be cared for and protected to the point where she has little choice in her own destiny. Her husband and sister-in-law do not want her to write in her journal at all, believing that it tires her out to think when they are there to think for her. She is able to maintain some inner life simply because the other two are willing accept that she sleeps all the time, when in fact she lies awake or prowls around her room. The entries in her
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