By Greg Johnson (Studies in Short Fiction. Vol. 26, Fall 1989.)
Rather than simply labeling the narrator a madwoman at the story's close, we might view her behavior as an expression of long-suppressed rage: a rage which causes a temporary breakdown. . . but which represents a prelude to psychic regeneration and artistic redemption. This reading accounts for two elements of the story usually ignored: its emphasis upon the narrator as a writer, who is keeping a journal and putting forth her own text—"The Yellow Wallpaper"—as an antithetical triumph over the actual wall paper that had nearly been her undoing; and its brittle, macabre, relentlessly satiric humor that suggests, in the story's earlier sections, her barely suppressed and steadily mounting anger.