What Does The Yellow Wallpaper Symbolize? (Symbolism)

In the short story "The Yellow Wallpaper" Jane and her husband John go to a colonial mansion for the summer. Jane has to stay in a room separate from her husband because he thinks she is sick. John is a physician and insists that Jane take medicine. The room Jane is staying in has bars over the windows, wallpaper that was a strange color yellow, and she had to stay in that room for most of the day while John was at work (2). Because Jane spent so much time in her room, she became obsessed with the wallpaper. "I am here, and no person touches this paper but me,--not alive" (10). Jane began to see a women inside of the paper and outside in the garden (6). The women she sees is her own reflection. When she looks through the window and in between the bars, she sees herself behind the bars. The bars in this story represented how women were treated unfairly by men. Women were always submissive to men and they did not receive as much respect as they deserved. The yellow wallpaper symbolized society. When Jane saw the women figure in the wallpaper, it represented how women were trapped and how they deserved their freedom and rights to be able to move and speak freely.

symbolism: the practice of representing things by symbols, or of investing things by a symbolic meaning or character

 http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/symbolism?s=t - This website helped me understand what symbolism is and gave me the definition.

 http://www.enotes.com/homework-help/symbolism-yellow-wallpaper-387309 - Using this website, it helped me figure out what the wallpaper symbolizes in the story.